Professor Stanley Fischer, World Renowned Economist, Dismissed By Trump

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                  
                                                                               

 Professor Stanley Fischer was born in Zambia on October 15, 1943. He holds B.Sc (Econ) and M.Sc. (Econ) degrees from the London School of Economics (1962-66), and obtained his Ph.D. in economics at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1969.

 

When he was 13, his family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he became active in the Habonim 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 went to the United Kingdom to study after receiving a scholarship from the London School of Economics, and obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in economics from 1962 to 1966.

 Fischer then moved to the United States to study at MIT, and earned 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 an American citizen in 1976.

Fischer was married to Rhoda Fischer (née Keet), whom he met during his days in Habonim. The couple has 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.  

  Stanley Fischer and PM Netanyahu when resigned from head of Bank of Israel : Noted economist who navigated Israel through world recession to step down in June, two years before the end of his second term. 

 Stanley was also the  8th governor of the Bank of Israel from 2005 to 2013. Born in Mazabuka, 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 Chief Economist of the World Bank.

Stanley Fischer, Washington DC economist:    (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.  The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, commonly known as the Federal Reserve Board, is the main governing body of the Federal Reserve System. It is charged with overseeing the Federal Reserve Banks and with helping implement the monetary policy of the United States. Governors are appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate for staggered 14-year terms. 

 (More below)

Another economist, Alvin Eliot Roth, Jewish, professor at Stanford University and Nobel Prize Winner in 2012, spoke at the Technion in Israel in August about his field of Economics specialty, that of market design--ways to optimally match people who need something with people who have it, without the usual price mechanism, by designing and creating markets where none existed back in 2017. 

Roth is an American academic. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University. He was President of the American Economics Association in 2017.

                                                      Prof. Adi Shamir

Roth explained that some economists do theoretical research.  Others do applied research.  At the Weizmann Institute in Israel, Prof. Adi Shamir was a winner of the Israel Prize.  He worked on the theory of prime numbers-numbers that cannot be divided by other numbers.  This research became the foundation of a method used all over the world for encrypting and transmitting sensitive data securely over the Internet call PGP or Pretty Good Privacy.  

Now, let's look at the field of Economics.  Many in this field are Jewish.  The Nobel Prize in Economics is officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,  which was launched in 1969.  (My reference was published in 2017)  Since then, 78 individuals have won the prize.  Of those, 26, one in three, were Jewish or over 150 times the proportion that Jews comprise of the world's population.  We Jews are 0.02% of world population with only 15-17 million Jews in the world.  Over 1/4 of Nobel winners in medicine and physics have been Jewish and 1/5 of all winners in chemistry as well.  Jews have been recipients of all six awards. The first Jewish recipient, Adolf von Baeyer, was awarded the prize in Chemistry in 1905.  

Jewish laureates Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész survived the extermination camps during the Holocaust, while François Englert survived by being hidden in orphanages and children's homes. Others, such as Walter Kohn, Otto Stern, Albert Einstein, Hans Krebs and Martin Karplus had to flee Nazi Germany to avoid persecution. Still others, including Rita Levi-Montalcini, Herbert Hauptman, Robert Furchgott, Arthur Kornberg, and Jerome Karle experienced significant antisemitism in their careers.

Arthur Ashkin, a 96-year-old American Jew, was, at the time of his award, the oldest person to receive a Nobel Prize.Arthur Ashkin

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018

Born: 2 September 1922, New York, NY, USA

Died: 21 September 2020, Rumson, NJ, USA

Affiliation at the time of the award: Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ, USA

Prize motivation: "for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems."

Considering the anti-Semitism prevailing in the world, this is a miracle that they were even considered, so they had to pretty outstanding in order to be on the list.  

Eleven Israelis have won Nobels, including two for Economics (Aumann, Kahneman);  three for Peace (Begin, Rabin, Peres, all prime ministers of Israel); one for Literature (Agnon), and five for Chemistry (Shechtman, Hershke, Ciechanover, Warshel and Yonath).                          

On January 10, 2014, President Barack Obama nominated Fischer to be Vice-Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board of Governors. On September 6, 2017, 

Stanley Fischer announced that he was resigning as Vice-Chairman for personal reasons effective October 13, 2017, just before his 74th birthday.

His past work experience shows that from 1994 through 2001, Fischer was 1st Deputy managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, serving as Fireman Stan and visiting countries that overspent and over-borrowed to help extinguish their financial crises.  It was a tough, thankless job.  Fisher did it exceedingly well.

Once chief economist at the World Bank and then first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund from 1994 to 2001, Fischer was a key figure in the IMF’s Mexican bailout after the peso crashed in the mid-1990s and the fund’s main firefighter as it sought to douse the flames of the Asian financial crisis.               

At the time, he negotiated repeatedly with troubled countries, jetting from one to the next as a financial storm swept through the world’s emerging markets. Robert Rubin, the influential former U.S. Treasury secretary, once described him as the “unsung hero” of the crises.

Fischer was an executive at Citigroup from February 2002 to April 2005, earning millions of dollars in salary and stock.

Fischer then served as governor of the Bank of Israel for nearly 2 terms from 2005 through 2013.  During that time, he deftly navigated Israel through the 2008 global financial crisis.  With his vast experience in managing crises, Israel was fortunate to have him.  

Also in 2009, he was the 1st governor of a central bank in the developed world to raise interest rates--a strong signal of confidence, and in 2010, the Bank of Israel was ranked 1st in the world for efficient functioning.  The financial magazine, Euromoney, named Fischer Central Bank Governor of the Year.  In Israel, Haaretz had an opinion poll in 2010, Fischer tied chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi for top approval rating--almost unprecedented for a central banker, in a country that reveres its generals.  

In 1985 when an economics professor at MIT, he was part of a team that built an effective stabilization plan to extinguish Israel's raging 450% inflation.  While still at MIT, Fischer directed the PhD thesis of a young student named Ben Bernanke, on the Great Depression of the 1930's.  Bernanke went onto become Governor of the US federal Reserve Bank for 2 terms, from 2006 to 2014.  During this time, Bernanke acted aggressively to deal with the 2008 financial crash by rapidly expanading the money supply.  Bernanke clearly had learned from Fischer, how financial crises could lead to depressions, in the absence of strong monetary  policy and his policies helped avert disaster.  

In an interview with Sam Fleming in 1917 of the Financial Times, Fischer spoke out strongly against the Trump administration's plans to weaken financial regulations implemented in the wake of a wave of bankruptcies involving major financial institutions, calling it "extremely dangerous and shortsighted."                      

"One cannot understand why grown intelligent people reach the conclusion to get rid of all the things you have put in place in the last 10 years," Fischer said.  "It took almost 80 years after 1930 to have another financial crisis of that magnitude.  And now, after 10 years, everybody wants to go back to a status quo before the great financial crisis.  I find that really extremely dangerous and shortsighted....I had a picture of the world economy in which the US was an anchor, not a source of volatility.  this really changes things."  

CNN announced shortly after Fischer's comment that he had resigned "for personal reasons."  His replacement as vice-chair of the Fed is a strong advocate for much weaker financial regulation.  President Donald Trump did not tolerate criticism and most likely will not reapppoint the current Federal Bank Governor, Janet Yellen, who had been as outspoken as Fischer.  Janet's been followed up with Richard Clarida.  

Resource:

The Jerusalem Report Mag, Sept. 27, 2017, Economics of Change by Shlomo Maital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Fischer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_E._Roth

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-fed-fischer-idINDEE9BA0F720131211