January 8, 2014
The Senate had still not acted on President Obama’s nomination of Janet Yellen to succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board when rumors began appearing in print over whom the president would nominate to succeed Yellen as the Fed’s vice chairman. ANew York Times headline on December 12 heralded the likely coming of Stanley Fischer, a “Central Banker in the Bernanke Mold.” Or perhaps Bernanke has all along been in the Fischer mold, since, as the Times story relates, Fischer taught Bernanke and other prominent bankers and economists when he was a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bernanke has cited Fischer as one of his most important mentors.
Fischer, should he be chosen and confirmed, could easily accommodate himself to the programs and policies of the current board. He is already on board with the “quantitative easing” program that has the Fed buying $85 billion of bonds a month to stimulate the economy, a practice that Fischer, an adventurous sort, has called both “dangerous” and “necessary.” He was vice chairman at Citigroup between 2002 and 2005, a period in which the company’s expansion, as the Times put it, “eventually ended in a federal bailout.” Born in Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1943, Fischer, 70, holds both U.S. and Israeli citizenship and has experience of global reach, having worked for both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund before becoming governor of the Bank of Israel. Fischer, like Yellen, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American branch of an international society dedicated to the eventual creation of a one-world government.
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