Macroeconomics is concerned with the behavior of the economy as a whole—with booms and recessions, the economy’s total output of goods and services, the growth of output, the rates of inflation and unemployment, the balance of payments, and exchange rates. Macroeconomics deals with both long-run economic growth and the short-run fluctuations that constitute the business cycle. Macroeconomics focuses on the economic behavior and policies that affect consumption and investment, the dollar and the trade balance, the determinants of changes in wages and prices, monetary and fiscal policies, the money stock, the federal budget, interest rates, and the national debt. In brief, macroeconomics deals with the major economic issues and problems of the day. To understand these issues, it is necessary to reduce the complicated details of the economy to manageable essentials. Those essentials lie in the interactions among the goods, labor, and assets markets of the economy and in the interactions among national economies that trade with each other. In dealing with the essentials, we go beyond details of the behavior of individual economic units, such as households and firms, or the determination of prices in particular markets, which are the subject matter of microeconomics. The Macroeconomics deals with the market for goods as a whole, treating all the markets for different goods—such as the markets for agricultural products and for medical services—as a single market.