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Stanley Fischer, a former politician of the US federal reserve and the Bank of Israel, whose thinking among the generations of economists was very influential, died at the age of 81.
As a former deputy chairman of the FED, Fischer was also used at the IMF, where he was the first deputy managing director to work on the reaction to the Asian and Russian crises of the late nineties. He was also chief economist at the World Bank.
Fischer’s death was announced on Sunday by the Bank of Israel, where he worked as a governor from 2005 to 2013. The President of the State of Isaac Herzog praised him as a “world-class specialist, a man of integrity, with a heart of gold”.
While he achieved some of the most high -ranking positions in the global economy, Fischer’s career was no less important due to his academic and apprenticeships, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The former President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, and former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke were among the students whose doctoral thesis he helped with the supervision.
“The human dimension of Stan’s work was as impressive and effective as its brilliant economic analysis and its remarkable communication skills,” said Mohamed el-Erian, President of the Queens’ College Cambridge and Chief Economic Adviser at Allianz.
“This quality was consistently obvious – be it in its approach to individual reform cases of individual countries, its persecution of a comprehensive, long -lasting and just peace in the Middle East or its contributions to the functionality of the international economic order.”
Fischer was born in Sambia in the 1940s as a British protectoration of North Rhodesia and was the son of Philip, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia who owned a country business in the city of Mazabuka, and Ann, who was born in Cape Town and was the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants.
Fischer later remembered that he had grown up from farmers with the influence of colonialism in his upbringing. “I am a product of the British Empire, there is no question,” he told the Financial Times in 2017. His family later moved to South Rhodesia, where he met his future woman Rhoda as a teenager, who died in 2020.
Fischer studied economics at the London School of Economics and started an academic career, which would also bring him to a MIT, where he received a doctorate in business in 1969 and ultimately a professorship.
His academic work in the 1970s turned out to be groundbreaking when he built the idea that activist central banks could stimulate the economy and become a leading figure in the new Keynsian economy. His published work included the influential book MacroeconomicsTogether with Rudi Dornbush and Richard Startz.
He joined the World Bank in 1988 before he became number two in the IMF in 1994 and served under Michel Camdessus. His period in the fund proved to be turbulent with the outbreak of the emerging market crises of the 90s.
He later moved to Citigroup, where he worked as a deputy chairman. As a double US Israeli citizen, Fischer joined the Bank of Israel in 2005, where he steered the country through the turbulence of the global financial crisis, which later broke out in the decade.
He joined the Fed in 2014 and was on the board under Janet Yellen. His period in the Fed was characterized by internal disagreements about interest rates, since Fischer campaigned for a Hawkischer approach to politics as a yellen.
After the first Trump administration took over the power in 2017 singing About the risks of financial regulation, which he is reversed when he described as “extremely dangerous and extremely short -sighted”.
“I had a picture of the global economy in which the United States were an anchor,” I had no volatility source, “said Fischer at that time.
Fischer resigned from his position at the Fed at the end of 2017, more than six months before the end of the post and said in a letter to President Donald Trump that his departure was for personal reasons.
At the time Lawrence Summers, former US finance minister, wrote In the FT that “through his teaching, writing, advice and leadership Stan had as much influence on global money as any other in the last generation”.
The former IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard praised Fischer on Sunday on social media and said: “He was an excellent economist, an outstanding political police player, but even more important, a big person.”
