Stanley Fischer (born October 15, 1943) is an Israeli American economist and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.

He served as governor of the Bank of Israel from 2005 to 2013. He previously served as chief economist at the World Bank. On January 10, 2014, United States 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.

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 like Robert Lucas with the idea that price stickiness still led to some degree of market shortcomings that an active monetary policy could help mitigate in times of economic downturns. The paper made Fischer a central figure in New Keynesian economics. Through this critique of new classical macroeconomics Fischer significantly contributed 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 was also Ben Bernanke’s, Mario Draghi’s and Greg Mankiw’s Ph.D. thesis advisor.

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

Link to the History of Economic Thought Website

A Portrait of Stanley Fischer in the Washington Post