Stanley Fischer was the Renaissance man of contemporary macroeconomists. He was among the most influential theorists of his generation. He taught many of the leading economic policymakers of the era, including the former chair of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and ex-president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi. With his friend and colleague, the late Rudi Dornbusch, he co-authored a path-breaking textbook on macroeconomics. Above all, perhaps, while at the IMF he managed the financial crises of the 1990s and early 2000s.
After obtaining his PhD at MIT in 1969, Fischer taught at the University of Chicago before returning to MIT as a professor. He was, therefore, ideally equipped to reconcile the free-market traditions of the former with the Keynesian ones of the latter. The result was his seminal article Long-Term Contracts, Rational Expectations, and the Optimal Money Supply Rule, published in 1977.
Fischer, who has died aged 81, was born into a Jewish family in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). His parents moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) when he was 13 years old. In 1960, he visited Israel as part of a winter programme for youth leaders, where he studied Hebrew. Subsequently, he studied economics at the London School of Economics between 1962 and 1966 before going to MIT. He was a dual national of the US and Israel.