Stanley Fischer

Stanley Fischer (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. He previously served as First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and as Chief Economist of the World Bank. 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. On September 6, 2017, Stanley Fischer announced that he was resigning as Vice-Chair for personal reasons effective October 13, 2017, 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. 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, 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. Through this critique of new classical macroeconomics, Fischer contributed significantly to clarifying the limits of the policy-ineffectiveness proposition.

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.

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

Public policy and banking career


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.

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. Fischer became an Israeli citizen, but did not renounce U.S. citizenship.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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”.

On May 21, 2014, the Senate confirmed Fischer's appointment to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. In a separate vote on June 12, he was confirmed as the vice chair. 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.

Awards and recognition
Fischer received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006. In October 2010, Fischer was declared Central Bank Governor of the Year by Euromoney magazine.

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, 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.