Latest news with #Fischer
Axios
17 hours ago
- Business
- Axios
Stanley Fischer, economic and central banking titan, dies at 81
Stanley Fischer's resume as a top policymaker was remarkable. But it was his intellectual leadership and mentorship that made him a unique force in the last four decades of global economic policy. The big picture: Fischer, a titan of economics and central banking who died this weekend at age 81, mentored generations of top economists and policymakers in his decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He trained them on a school of economic thought that was intellectually rigorous — but hardly confined to abstract theory. Fischer's approach offered practical answers for policymakers navigating a recession or crisis. His mentees included eventual Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke, former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, current Bank of Japan governor Kazuo Ueda — just the start of a who's who list of modern economic policy. Fischer served in major leadership roles himself. He was the No. 2 official at the International Monetary Fund (1994-2001) and the Federal Reserve (2014-2017), as well as governor of the Bank of Israel (2005-2013). Flashback: Fischer guided the IMF through the East Asian crises of the late 1990s, seeking to balance rescues of indebted nations with demands that they reform their domestic economies as a condition of aid. While those reforms' results were painful at the time, affected countries — including Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea — boomed in the ensuing decade. As head of Israel's central bank, he guided the nation through the Global Financial Crisis, which it weathered better than most countries.
News.com.au
a day ago
- Business
- News.com.au
Anthony Albanese says action on climate targets ‘not ideological' but based on reality
Anthony Albanese says Labor was 'not being ideological' on its climate change target, but being 'real' on the need for immediate and long-term strategies to tackle climate change. The Prime Minister made the comments while visiting drought affected farming communities in Fischer, about 96km from Adelaide, where he was asked about the impact of climate change and how he plans on achieving bipartisan support on Labor's net zero targets. While former Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison initially committed Australia to reaching net zero by 2050, the topic has become a point of political argy-bargy, with some members of the Coalition calling on the party to abandon the promise. However, Mr Albanese said science had shown that extreme weather events were becoming more common, and said climate wars were 'pretty pointless'. 'Getting in a debate about whether, you know, any specific event is because of climate change is, in my view, a cul-de-sac that leads you back to the same place,' he said alongside SA Premier Peter Malinauskas and Agriculture Minister Julie Collins. 'The place is that climate change is real and we need to respond to it.' He said government had a 'responsibility' to tackle both the immediate and long term issues related to climate change, and that the response was not political. 'We're not being ideological about this, we're being real about this … the farmers that I meet know there's something going on with the weather,' he said. 'That's why we engaged in the lead up to setting those emissions targets that were going forward.' Labor has so far committed to reaching net zero by 2050, while also reducing emissions by 43 per cent by 2030. The government has also been under pressure to release the 2035 target, however it is waiting on further consultation with the Climate Change Authority, headed by former NSW Liberal minister Matt Kean. Speaking on Sunday, Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said he believed Australia was 'by and large on track' to meet the 43 per cent 2030 emission reduction targets, despite figures released on Friday revealing that emissions had increased year-on-year by 0.05 per cent. On Monday, Mr Albanese also announced that the 2025 National Drought Forum will be held in nearby town of Gawler, with the state experiencing some of the driest conditions on record. Mr Albanese also committed an extra $2m to the Rural Financial Counselling Service, on top of the $36m in previous funding for the Future Drought Fund Communities Program to bolster social resilience among agriculture-dependent communities. The funding pledge has been welcomed by the National Farmers Federation president David Jochinke who said farmers were facing conditions which 'have to be seen to be believed'. 'Things are really tough right now in large parts of South Australia and Victoria, as well as areas in Tasmania, NSW and Western Australia,' he said. 'We're not just talking about dry paddocks and low rainfall. For some regions, there's been multiple bad seasons and entire communities are under pressure. 'We thank Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister Julie Collins for showing up and listening. We hope the visit will help them see the urgency of the situation and the need for action.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
‘No sense': Albo lashes US defence target
Anthony Albanese has rejected a blanket commitment to lifting Australia's defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP, ruling out the renewed demand from the Trump administration. With the Prime Minister poised for his first face-to-face meeting with US President Donald Trump in a matter of weeks, Mr Albanese maintained that defence spending would be calculated depending on Australia's needs and capabilities. 'There's been a range of things going forward. What you should do in defence is decide what you need, your capability and then provide for it,' he told reporters during a visit to drought-affected farming communities in Fischer, South Australia. 'That's what my government is doing. Investing in our capability and investing in our relationships.' As it stands, Labor's additional $10bn in defence investment will lift spending to 2.3 per cent of GDP by 2033-34. Mr Albanese said committing to a specific figure 'made no sense', taking a shot at the Coalition's election commitment to boost funding by $21bn, which would have increased spending to 3 per cent by 2030. 'What we don't do is do what the opposition did during the election campaign, where they announced an amount of money,' he said. 'They couldn't say where the money was coming from, and they couldn't say what it was for. That makes no sense. What we need is things that defend us in real terms, and that's what we'll provide.' Washington's call for Australia to step up military spending came from a bilateral meeting between Defence Minister Richard Marles and his US defence counterpart Pete Hegseth. The two senior officials met over the weekend on the sidelines of the Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore over the weekend. In a read out, the US Embassy said the two senior officials 'discussed aligning investment to the security environment in the Indo-Pacific, accelerating US force posture initiatives in Australia, advancing defence industrial base co-operation, and creating supply chain resilience'. 'On defence spending, Secretary Hegseth conveyed that Australia should increase its defence spending to 3.5 per cent of its GDP as soon as possible,' the embassy said. Mr Hegseth used his address at the Shangri La Dialogue to warn of an 'imminent' threat from China, saying Beijing could invade Taiwan as early as 2027. Such a move would deal a major blow to global supply of semiconductors and likely massively disrupt vital trade routes. 'Let me be clear, any attempt by Communist China to conquer Taiwan by force would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world,' Mr Hegseth told the conference. 'There's no reason to sugar-coat it. The threat China poses is real and it could be imminent. 'We hope not but certainly could be.' 'Money back': Lambie's rogue reply to US demand Earlier on Monday, independent senator Jacqui Lambie said Australia should be looking to cut 'waste' in the Australian Defence Force before looking to pump more cash into it. Reacting to the Trump administration calling on Canberra to boost the defence budget amid increased Chinese aggression the Indo-Pacific. A veteran and fierce advocate for the ADF, Senator Lambie quipped that the Albanese government should 'just ask Donald Trump to give us their money back for our submarines mate'. 'It'd be nice to lift our defence spending – there is no doubt about that,' she told Sky News. 'Things are pretty tough out there at the moment, but I think it's more the waste. 'We waste so much money in defence procurement, and that's where we should be looking.' Senator Lambie pointed to the drawn-out build timelines for the AUKUS submarines. Under the trilateral defence pact, Australia is set to build five of the nuclear-powered boats in South Australia. The first is expected to be finished by the early 2040s. 'You've only got to see those submarines,' Senator Lambie said. 'Four billion dollars so far – we haven't got one scrap of bloody steel sitting in a harbour yet ready to go. 'I mean, that is just disgusting waste at its best.' Asked what Australia could do in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Senator Lambie replied: 'I don't know, have you seen the size of the Chinese army? 'That's the first thing, and the second thing is this – have you seen the condition that ours is in?' 'We have a personnel crisis in our military, and something needs to be done. 'The only way young people are going to go and join is when people in that uniform go out there and brag how great that job (is).' She said the recruitment crisis was 'the biggest problem you have with our national security right now'. 'People do not want to join defence, and people do not want to stay in,' Senator Lambie said. She also said Australian troops were 'not in the condition to being in a war zone'. Labor has pushed back against Mr Hegseth's call to lift the defence budget, with Anthony Albanese saying his government was already spending record amounts on the military. Assistant Foreign Affairs Minister Matt Thistlethwaite on Monday echoed the Prime Minister. 'We are increasing our defence spending over the course of the next three years,' Mr Thistlethwaite told Sky News. 'Defence spending increases by about 10½ billion dollars and about $50bn over the course of the next decade.' Mr Thistlethwaite added that the Albanese government was increasing defence spending to '2½ per cent of GDP', including through AUKUS. The Trump administration's demand came just days after a leading defence think tank said Australia must bolster its immediate readiness to go to war or risk having a 'paper ADF'. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute warned that while Labor was spending on longer-term projects it was not pumping nearly enough cash into keeping Australia combat-ready in the near term.
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Business Standard
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Standard
Stanley Fischer, who shaped global macroeconomic policy, dies at 81
By Laurence Arnold and Alisa Odenheimer Stanley Fischer, a professor and practitioner of macroeconomics who helped guide central banks in two countries, Israel and the US, and mentored a younger generation of economic decision-makers, has died. He was 81. He died on Saturday, the Bank of Israel said in a statement, expressing condolences. Fischer, known as Stan, served as vice chairman of the US Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2017 following eight years as governor of the Bank of Israel, adding to a resume that included time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spells at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and a stint as vice chairman of New York-based Citigroup Inc. The roster of MIT students he taught and advised included Ben S. Bernanke, who would go on to become Fed chair and called Fischer his mentor; Mario Draghi, a future European Central Bank president and prime minister of Italy; Lawrence Summers, who would serve as US Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton; Greg Mankiw, who would lead President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers; Kazuo Ueda, named Bank of Japan governor in 2023; and IMF chief economists, including Olivier Blanchard, Ken Rogoff and Maurice Obstfeld. Countless other college undergraduates were introduced to the dismal science by Macroeconomics, the textbook Fischer wrote in 1978 with his MIT colleague, Rudi Dornbusch. The 13th edition of the book was published in 2018. 'It is hard to think of any other macroeconomist alive who has had as much direct and indirect influence, through his own research, his students, and his policy decisions, on macroeconomic policy around the world,' Blanchard wrote of Fischer in 2023. Fischer and Blanchard co-authored Lectures on Macroeconomics, published in 1989. Dispatched on several occasions to extinguish economic emergencies around the world, Fischer drew academic lessons from his first-hand experience with countries in crisis. The pattern began in 1983, when George Shultz, then the US secretary of state, invited Fischer to serve on a joint US-Israeli team of experts helping Israel reverse a prolonged period of weak growth, triple-digit inflation and falling foreign exchange reserves. Their work resulted, in 1985, in an economic stabilization program combining a large reduction in government subsidies with the fixing of the exchange rate, a tightening of monetary policy, and wage and price controls — followed, crucially, by the US supplying a $1.5 billion two-year aid package. That was a prelude to Fischer's tenure as the No. 2 official at the IMF, the lender of last resort to countries in economic peril. Starting in 1994, Fischer traveled the globe to help resolve interrelated financial crises in Mexico, Russia, Brazil, Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea. His role meant he often overshadowed his boss, IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus. But years later, Fischer credited Camdessus with keeping a sense of calm following the collapse of the Mexican peso in 1994, the first IMF crisis Fischer faced. Emergency Loans 'I thought Western civilization as we knew it was coming to an end,' but Camdessus 'had seen this particular play before,' Fischer recalled. The IMF provided about $250 billion in emergency loans during Fischer's seven years as first deputy managing director, ending in 2001. To accept Israel's 2005 offer to head its central bank, Fischer, an American citizen since 1976, added Israeli citizenship. He conducted business in Hebrew, with an accent that indicated his upbringing in southern Africa. Under his leadership, Israel's central bank was the first to cut rates in 2008 at the start of the global economic crisis, and the first to raise rates the following year in response to signs of financial recovery. In 2011, responding to a global downturn, the bank embarked on a series of rate cuts that pushed the benchmark from 3.25% to a record low 0.1% in 2015. Major changes enacted by Fischer during his eight-year tenure included shifting responsibility for the monthly interest-rate decision from the governor alone to a six-member Monetary Committee, including three outside academics. 'It is testament to Stan's skillful handling of Israel's economy that it is one of the very few advanced economies whose output increased every year through the crisis period,' former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said in 2013. President Barack Obama appointed Fischer as vice chairman of the Fed Board of Governors under Janet Yellen. Fischer announced his retirement in 2017, a year before his four-year term was to end. He joined BlackRock Inc. as an adviser in 2019. Africa Upbringing Fischer was born on Oct. 15, 1943, in Mazabuka, a town in Zambia, the nation then known as Northern Rhodesia. His family was part of a close-knit community of Jews who had emigrated to southern Africa. His Latvian-born father, Philip, ran a general store. His mother, Ann, had been born in Cape Town, the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, according to a Financial Times profile. At 13, the family moved to Zimbabwe, then called Southern Rhodesia, where Stanley became active in the Habonim, a Zionist youth group, along with Rhoda Keet, his future wife. In the early 1960s, he spent six months on a kibbutz on Israel's Mediterranean coastal plain, where he combined learning Hebrew with picking and planting bananas. He was introduced to economics through a course in his senior year in high school and moved to the UK to study at the London School of Economics, earning a bachelor's degree in 1965 and a master's in 1966. He chose MIT for his doctorate work so that he could study under future Nobel laureate economists Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. He said he may have been drawn to macroeconomics 'because I was interested in big questions.' 'I had this image of the world as we knew it having nearly collapsed in the 1930s, and that these guys' — the macroeconomists — 'had saved it,' he said in a 2005 interview with Blanchard. He earned his Ph.D. in economics in 1969, worked as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, then returned to MIT in 1973 as an associate professor. The first course he taught was monetary economics, alongside Samuelson. He became a full professor in 1977. Bernanke, who earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 1979, traced his interest in monetary policy to a conversation he had with Fischer — 'then a rising academic star' — in the late 1970s. He said Fischer handed him a copy of A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (1963), by Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, with the encouragement, 'Read this. It may bore you to death. But if it excites you, you might consider monetary economics.' Bernanke credited Fischer with popularizing the principle that while the Fed pursues goals set by the president and Congress, it has policy independence — freedom to use its tools as it sees fit to achieve those goals. As chief economist of World Bank from 1988 to 1990, Fischer visited China and India and became, he later said, 'gripped by the problem of development.' After Fischer left the IMF in 2001, he joined Citigroup Inc. as a vice chairman and drew on his experience to lead the bank's country risk committee. Fischer declared himself a candidate for the top role at the IMF in 2011, following the resignation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. At 67, however, he was over the IMF's age limit of 65 for managing directors, meaning he would have needed a change in rules. The job went to Christine Lagarde. In 2013, Fischer was thought to be a possible candidate to succeed Bernanke at the helm of the Fed. Obama instead chose Yellen, with Fischer as her deputy. 'In a just world, Stan would have served at some point as Fed chairman or managing director of the IMF,' Summers wrote in 2017. 'Fate is fickle and it did not happen. But Stan through his teaching, writing, advising and leading has had as much influence on global money as anyone in the last generation. Hundreds of millions of people have lived better because of his efforts.' ©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
Time of India
2 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Stanley Fischer, ex-vice Chair of US Federal Reserve and macroeconomist, dies at 81
Stanley Fischer, a highly influential figure in macroeconomics, has passed away at 81. He shaped central banking in Israel and the US, mentored prominent economists like Bernanke and Draghi, and co-authored the widely used textbook "Macroeconomics." Fischer's impact on global macroeconomic policy is immeasurable, leaving behind a legacy of research, teaching, and policy decisions. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads New York: Stanley Fischer , a professor and practitioner of macroeconomics who helped guide central banks in two countries, Israel and the US, and mentored a younger generation of economic decision-makers, has died. He was died on Saturday, the Bank of Israel said in a statement, expressing known as Stan, served as vice chairman of the US Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2017 following eight years as governor of the Bank of Israel, adding to a resume that included time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spells at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and a stint as vice chairman of New York-based Citigroup roster of MIT students he taught and advised included Ben S. Bernanke, who would go on to become Fed chair and called Fischer his mentor; Mario Draghi, a future European Central Bank president and prime minister of Italy; Lawrence Summers, who would serve as US Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton; Greg Mankiw, who would lead President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers; Kazuo Ueda, named Bank of Japan governor in 2023; and IMF chief economists, including Olivier Blanchard, Ken Rogoff and Maurice other college undergraduates were introduced to the dismal science by Macroeconomics, the textbook Fischer wrote in 1978 with his MIT colleague, Rudi Dornbusch. The 13th edition of the book was published in 2018."It is hard to think of any other macroeconomist alive who has had as much direct and indirect influence, through his own research, his students, and his policy decisions, on macroeconomic policy around the world," Blanchard wrote of Fischer in 2023. Fischer and Blanchard co-authored Lectures on Macroeconomics, published in 1989. -BB
