Stanley Fischer

Stanley Fischer was born in 1943 in Mazabuka

Fischer was born on October 15, 1943, into a Jewish family in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. His Hebrew name was Shlomo Ben Pesach Hacohen. His family later moved to Southern Rhodesia, where he was active in the Habonim youth movement, and in 1960 he studied Hebrew at kibbutz Ma'agan Michael.

He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in economics at the London School of Economics between 1962 and 1966. He then completed a Ph.D. in economics at MIT in 1969. He became a United States citizen in 1976.

Fischer taught at the University of Chicago and from 1973 at MIT, where he supervised the doctorate of Ben Bernanke. His 1977 paper on long-term contracts and rational expectations helped lay the basis of New Keynesian economics. He also wrote economics textbooks, including Macroeconomics with Rüdiger Dornbusch.

He was chief economist of the World Bank from 1988 to 1990 and first deputy managing director of the IMF from 1994 to 2001, then an executive at Citigroup. In 2005 he became governor of the Bank of Israel and received Israeli citizenship. In 2014 Barack Obama nominated him as vice chair of the Federal Reserve, a post he left in 2017.

Fischer married Rhoda Keet in 1965, and they had three children. She died in 2020. Fischer died of Alzheimer's disease at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on May 31, 2025.