Stanley Fischer, emeritus professor of economics, has taught and mentored an extraordinary number of central bankers at MIT, including Ben Bernanke, Mario Draghi, Phillip Lowe and Guy Debelle (Reserve Bank of Australia), Ilan Goldfajn (former governor of the Banco Central do Brazil), and Frederic Mishkin (former member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors).
As Kazuo Ueda, another of Fischer's former advisees, seems poised to become the next governor of the Bank of Japan, Financial Times Alphaville takes a look at Fischer's astounding influence on an entire generation of central bankers and other leading economists.
As Robin Wigglesworth writes, "FT Alphaville would argue that Fischer is the most quietly influential person in global economics over the past several decades, thanks to his mentoring of a legion of Stan stans that went on to hold uniquely powerful positions around the world...Over his time teaching at MIT Fischer helped nurture an incredible array of [central bankers and] other leading economists, such as Kenneth Rogoff, Christy Romer, Olivier Blanchard, Paul Krugman, Maury Obstfeld, Nathan Sheets and Greg Mankiw.
In other words, playing seven degrees of Kevin Bacon using influential economists and Stan Fischer instead of actors and the Footloose star would be silly, because you’d probably never need more than two degrees to connect Fischer to anyone who’s anyone in the field."
