Stanley Fischer

Stanley Fischer (Hebrew: סטנלי פישר; October 15, 1943 – May 31, 2025) was an American and Israeli 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 held 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. On September 6, 2017, Fischer announced that he was resigning as vice-chair for personal reasons effective October 13, 2017. He was a senior advisor at BlackRock.

Stanley Fischer, whose Hebrew name was Shlomo Ben Pesach Hacohen, was born into a Jewish family in Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), on October 15, 1943. 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.

Fischer initially intended to study chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but was drawn to economics after being introduced to the work of Paul Samuelson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and reading The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes. He accepted a scholarship to attend the London School of Economics in England, where he received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in economics between 1962 and 1966. While at LSE, he studied Keynesian macroeconomics and was introduced to econometric modeling. He subsequently enrolled in the doctoral program in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), citing the presence of Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow as a primary factor in his decision. He received a Ph.D. in 1969 with a dissertation titled Essays on Assets and Contingent Commodities, which addressed general equilibrium theory under uncertainty. He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1976.

In 1965, Fischer married Rhoda 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 died in 2020.

Fischer died from Alzheimer's disease at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on May 31, 2025, at age 81.

Fischer began his academic career at the University of Chicago faculty, serving as an assistant professor from 1970 to 1973. He returned to MIT in 1973, where he stayed for the remainder of his academic career. He held the Elizabeth and James Killian Class of 1926 Professorship from 1992 to 1995 and served as department chair in 1993–94, before working at the IMF.

Many of Fischer's students at MIT went on to prominent roles in global economic policy, including Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, Inter-American Development Bank president Ilan Goldfajn, Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe, and Bank of Japan governor Kazuo Ueda. Others, such as Greg Mankiw and Christina Romer, chaired the Council of Economic Advisers, while Maurice Obstfeld, Kenneth Rogoff, and Frederic Mishkin held senior positions at the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve.

In 1977, Fischer published the paper Long-Term Contracts, Rational Expectations, and the Optimal Money Supply Rule, which reconciled the concept of rational expectations—developed by new classical economists such as Robert Lucas—with the phenomena of price stickiness and observed this fusion creates certain market imperfections and advocated for active monetary policy to mitigate economic downturns. Through this critique of new classical macroeconomics, Fischer contributed significantly to clarifying the limits of the policy-ineffectiveness proposition. Fischer's analysis contributed to the foundation of New Keynesian economics.