Stanley Fischer
20th Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve
In office
June 16, 2014 – October 13, 2017
PresidentBarack Obama
Donald Trump
Preceded byJanet Yellen
Succeeded byRichard Clarida
Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve
In office
May 21, 2014 – October 13, 2017
PresidentBarack Obama
Donald Trump
Preceded byBen Bernanke
Succeeded byMichelle Bowman
8th Governor of the Bank of Israel
In office
May 1, 2005 – June 30, 2013
Prime MinisterAriel Sharon
Ehud Olmert
Benjamin Netanyahu
Preceded byDavid Klein
Succeeded byKarnit Flug
6th First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund
In office
September 1, 1994 – August 31, 2001
Managing DirectorMichel Camdessus
Horst Köhler
Preceded byRichard Erb
Succeeded byAnne Osborn Krueger
3rd Chief Economist of the World Bank
In office
January 1988 – August 1990
PresidentBarber Conable
Preceded byAnne Osborn Krueger
Succeeded byLawrence Summers
Personal details
Born (1943-10-15) October 15, 1943
Mazabuka, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia)
Spouse
Rhoda Keet
​
(died 2020)​
Children3
EducationLondon School of Economics (BS, MS)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD)
Signature
Academic career
FieldMacroeconomics
School or
tradition		New Keynesian economics
Doctoral
advisor		Franklin M. Fisher[1]
Doctoral
students		Zvi Bodie[2]
Isher Judge Ahluwalia[3]
Frederic Mishkin[4]
Steven M. Sheffrin[5]
Olivier Blanchard[6]
Ben Bernanke[7]
David Hsieh[8]
Kenneth D. West[9]
Greg Mankiw[10]
Jeffrey Miron[11]
Mark Bils[12]
David Romer[13]
Ricardo J. Caballero[14]
Michael Kuehlwein[15]
D. Nathan Sheets[16]
Ilan Goldfajn[17]

Stanley Fischer (Hebrew: סטנלי פישר; born October 15, 1943) is an Israeli-American economist who served as the 20th Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2017. Fischer previously served as the 8th Governor of the Bank of Israel from 2005 to 2013. Born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), he holds dual citizenship in Israel and the United States.[18] He previously served as First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and as Chief Economist of the World Bank.[19] On January 10, 2014, President Barack Obama nominated Fischer to the position of Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve. He is a senior advisor at BlackRock.[20] On September 6, 2017, Stanley Fischer announced that he was resigning as Vice-Chair for personal reasons effective October 13, 2017,[21] two days before his 74th birthday.

Biography

Stanley Fischer was born into a Jewish family in Mazabuka, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). When he was 13, his family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he became an active member of Habonim, a Labor Zionist youth movement. In 1960, he visited Israel as part of a winter program for youth leaders, and studied Hebrew at kibbutz Ma'agan Michael. He had originally planned to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but instead accepted a scholarship to attend the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom, where he received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in economics between 1962 and 1966. Fischer then went on to graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. in economics in 1969 with a thesis titled Essays on Assets and Contingent Commodities, written under the supervision of Franklin M. Fisher.[1][22] He became a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1976.

Fischer was married to Rhoda Fischer (née Keet), whom he met during his days in Habonim; the couple had three children. When they moved to Israel, Rhoda became honorary president of Aleh Negev, a rehabilitation village for the disabled. Rhoda Fischer passed away in 2020.

Academic career

In the early 1970s, Fischer was an associate professor at the University of Chicago. He was a professor at the Department of Economics at MIT from 1977 to 1988.

In 1977, Fischer wrote the paper Long-Term Contracts, Rational Expectations, and the Optimal Money Supply Rule,[23] where he combined the idea of rational expectations argued by new classical economists such as Robert Lucas with the idea that price stickiness still led to some degree of market shortcomings, and so argued that an active monetary policy could help mitigate problems in times of economic downturn. The paper made Fischer a central figure in New Keynesian economics.[24][25] Through this critique of new classical macroeconomics, Fischer contributed significantly to clarifying the limits of the policy-ineffectiveness proposition.[26]

He authored three popular economics textbooks, Macroeconomics (with Rüdiger Dornbusch and Richard Startz), Lectures on Macroeconomics (with Olivier Blanchard), and the introductory Economics, with David Begg and Rüdiger Dornbusch. He also mentored and helped advise the Ph.D. theses authored by economists Ben Bernanke, Mario Draghi, and Greg Mankiw.[27]

In 2012, Fischer served as Humanitas Visiting Professor in Economic Thought at the University of Oxford.[28]

Banking career

Stanley Fischer at 2000 in International Monetary Fund

From January 1988 to August 1990 he served as Chief Economist of the World Bank. He was then appointed First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, and served in that role from September 1994 to August 2001. By the end of 2001, Fischer had joined the Group of Thirty, an influential Washington-based financial advisory body. From February 2002 to April 2005, after leaving the IMF, he was an executive at Citigroup, where he served as Vice Chairman, President of Citigroup International, and Head of the Public Sector Client Group.[29]

Bank of Israel

Fischer was appointed Governor of the Bank of Israel in January 2005 by the Israeli cabinet, after being recommended by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He had been involved in the past with the Bank of Israel; he had helped implement Israel’s 1985 Economic Stabilization Plan as an American government adviser. He took the position on May 1, 2005, replacing David Klein (who ended his term on January 16, 2005), and was sworn in for a second term on May 2, 2010.[30] Fischer became an Israeli citizen, but did not renounce U.S. citizenship.[31][32][33]

Fischer during the WEF 2010

Under his management, in 2010, the Bank of Israel was ranked first among central banks for its efficient functioning, according to IMD's World Competitiveness Yearbook.[34]

Fischer was widely praised for his handling of the Israeli economy in the aftermath of the global financial crisis; in September 2009, the Bank of Israel was the first bank in the developed world to raise interest rates.[35]

In 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 Fischer received an "A" rating on the Central Banker Report Card published by Global Finance magazine.[36][37]

In June 2011, Fischer applied for the post of IMF managing director to replace Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but was barred, as the IMF stipulates that a new managing director must be no older than 65, and he was 67 at the time.[38]

On June 30, 2013, Fischer stepped down as Governor of the Bank of Israel halfway through his second term,[39] despite high popularity.[40]

U.S. Federal Reserve

American President Barack Obama nominated Fischer to the position of Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, the United States' central bank, in January 2014. In nominating Fischer for the position, Obama stated he brought “decades of leadership and expertise from various roles, including serving at the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of Israel”.[41]

On May 21, 2014, the Senate confirmed Fischer's appointment to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.[42] In a separate vote on June 12, he was confirmed as the vice chair.[42] Fischer succeeded Janet Yellen as vice chair; Yellen had become Chair of the Federal Reserve earlier in 2014. Fischer resigned for personal reasons in mid-October, 2017, 8 months before the expiry in June 2018 of his term as vice chair.[43][44]

Awards and recognition

Fischer received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006.[45] In October 2010, Fischer was declared Central Bank Governor of the Year by Euromoney magazine.[46]

He is a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended its conferences in 1996, 1998 and 1999. He also appears to have attended the Bilderberg Group’s conference in 2011 in St. Moritz, Switzerland,[47] though (as of March 2016) his name does not show up on the list of participants for the year 2011. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. Fischer was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2013. He is also a member of the Inter-American Dialogue.[48]

References

  1. 1 2 Fisher, Stanley (1969). Essays on assets and contingent commodities (Ph.D.). MIT. hdl:1721.1/13873. Retrieved 25 May 2017.
  2. ↑ Bodie, Zvi (1975). Hedging against inflation (Ph.D.). MIT. Retrieved 23 May 2017.
  3. ↑ Ahluwalia, Isher Judge (1976). A macro-econometric model of the Indian economy analyzing inflation during 1951-1973 (Ph.D.). MIT. Retrieved 30 May 2017.
  4. ↑ Mishkin, Frederic Stanley (1976). Illiquidity, the demand for consumer durables, and monetary policy (Ph.D.). MIT. Retrieved 24 May 2017.
  5. ↑ Sheffrin, Steven M. (1976). Rational expectations and employment fluctuations (Ph.D.). MIT. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  6. ↑ Blanchard, Olivier (1977). Two essays on economic fluctuations (Ph.D.). MIT. Retrieved 1 February 2017.
  7. ↑ Bernanke, Ben (1979). Long-term commitments, dynamic optimization, and the business cycle (PDF) (PhD). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 23 October 2016.
  8. ↑ Hsieh, David Arthur (1981). Expectations and efficiencies in international markets (Ph.D.). MIT. Retrieved 27 May 2017.
  9. ↑ West, Kenneth D. (1983). Inventory models and backlog costs : an empirical investigation (PDF) (Ph.D.). MIT. Retrieved 16 March 2017.
  10. ↑ "A Profile of Stanley Fischer". GREG MANKIW'S BLOG. September 19, 2016.
  11. ↑ Miron, Jeffrey Alan (1984). The economics of seasonal time series (Ph.D.). MIT. Retrieved 27 May 2017.
  12. ↑ Bils, Mark (1985). Essays on the cyclical behavior of cost and price (Ph.D.). MIT. Retrieved 27 May 2017.
  13. ↑ Romer, David (1985). General equilibrium analysis of government financial policies (Ph.D.). MIT. Retrieved 24 May 2017.
  14. ↑ Caballero, Ricardo J. (1988). The Stochastic Behavior of Consumption and Savings (PDF) (Ph.D.). MIT. Retrieved 17 October 2016.
  15. ↑ "Michael Kuehlwein". The Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 27 August 2021.
  16. ↑ Sheets, D. Nathan (1993). Essays in intersectoral economics: exchange rates, public capital and productivity (Ph.D.). MIT. hdl:1721.1/12708. Retrieved 27 May 2017.
  17. ↑ Goldfajn, Ilan (1995). On public debt and exchange rates (Ph.D.). MIT. hdl:1721.1/11082. Retrieved 25 May 2017.
  18. ↑ Stanley Fischer firms as top choice to become US Fed vice, The Sydney Morning Herald, via Bloomberg News, December 12, 2013.
  19. ↑ Ewing, Jack (12 June 2011). "Bank of Israel Chief Enters Race to Lead I.M.F". The New York Times.
  20. ↑ Fleming, Sam (13 February 2019). "Former Fed vice-chair Stanley Fischer to join BlackRock". Financial Times.
  21. ↑ "Stanley Fischer submits resignation as a member of the Board of Governors, effective on or around October 13, 2017". Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Retrieved 2017-09-06.
  22. ↑ Stanley Fischer at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  23. ↑ Stanley Fischer (1977) Long-Term Contracts, Rational Expectations, and the Optimal Money Supply Rule Journal of Political Economy.
  24. ↑ Binyamim Appelbaum (December 12, 2013) Young Stanley Fischer and the Keynesian Counterrevolution New York Times. Retrieved 15 December 2014
  25. ↑ Dylan Matthews (January 13, 2014) Stanley Fischer saved Israel from the Great Recession. Now Janet Yellen wants him to help save the U.S. Washington Post. Retrieved January 15, 2014
  26. ↑ Galbács, Peter (2015). The Theory of New Classical Macroeconomics. A Positive Critique. Contributions to Economics. Heidelberg/New York/Dordrecht/London: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-17578-2. ISBN 978-3-319-17578-2.
  27. ↑ "Good News". Greg Mankiw's Blog. 18 May 2011.
  28. ↑ "Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Economic Thought" Archived 2013-05-12 at the Wayback Machine, Institute for Strategic Thought, University of Oxford, 5–6 November 2012.
  29. ↑ "Stanley Fischer, Fed Nominee, Has Long History of Policy Leadership", New York Times, March 12, 2014.
  30. ↑ Filut, Adrian (2 May 2010). "Stanley Fischer sworn in for second term". Globes. Retrieved 2 May 2010.
  31. ↑ Mitnick, Joshua (13 June 2011). "Israel's Stanley Fischer Announces Bid to Head the IMF". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 30 December 2012.
  32. ↑ Odenheimer, Alisa (12 June 2011). "Fischer's Age, Nationality Are Hurdles in Bid for IMF Post". Bloomberg News. Archived from the original on June 14, 2011. Retrieved 30 December 2012.
  33. ↑ Klein, Zeev (19 January 2005). "Bach c'tee approves Fischer". Globes. Retrieved 30 December 2012.
  34. ↑ Viniar, Olga (20 May 2010). "Israel's economy most durable in face of crises". Ynetnews. ynetnews.com. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  35. ↑ Levy, Tal; Bassok, Moti (25 August 2009). "Israel central bank first in developed world to raise interest". Haaretz. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  36. ↑ "World's Top Central Bankers 2009". Global Finance. 28 September 2010. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  37. ↑ "Global Finance Magazine names the World's Top Central Bankers 2010". Global Finance. 9 September 2010. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  38. ↑ Wroughton, Lesley (13 June 2011). "Lagarde, Carstens shortlisted for IMF race-officials". Reuters.
  39. ↑ "Stanley Fischer to step down as BOI chief". Ynetnews. Ynet News. 29 January 2013. Retrieved 30 January 2013.
  40. ↑ Dylan Matthews (15 February 2013). "Stan Fischer saved Israel's economy. Can he save America's?". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 16 February 2013.
  41. ↑ AP, Reuters. "Obama Nominates Former Bank of Israel Chief Stanley Fischer as Fed Vice Chairman". Ha'aretz. Retrieved 6 January 2018. {{cite news}}: |last1= has generic name (help)
  42. 1 2 Puzzanghera, Jim (June 12, 2014). "Senate confirms Brainard, Powell for Fed seats, Fischer as vice chair". The Los Angeles Times.
  43. ↑ Liesman, Steve (2017-12-21). "Larry Lindsey being considered for Fed vice chair job: Sources". CNBC. Retrieved 6 January 2018.
  44. ↑ "Stanley Fischer Quits No. 2 Post At Federal Reserve". Forward Magazine. Reuters. 6 September 2017. Retrieved 6 January 2018.
  45. ↑ "Stanley Fischer: The Israeli economy" (PDF). bis.org. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  46. ↑ "Central bank governor of the year 2010: Stanley Fischer's bold moves show the value of experience". Euromoney. October 2010.
  47. ↑ "Bilderberg 2011 list of participants". BilderbergMeetings.org. Archived from the original on August 28, 2011. Retrieved August 24, 2011.
  48. ↑ "Inter-American Dialogue | Experts". www.thedialogue.org. Archived from the original on 2020-02-02. Retrieved 2017-04-11.
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