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U.S. Fed nominee Fischer taught Bernanke, fought crises
WASHINGTON – Stanley Fischer, President Barack Obama’s pick to be vice chairman at the Federal Reserve, is a pragmatic policymaker who battled economic crises in Mexico and Asia and steered Israel’s economy safely out of the 2008 global financial meltdown.
He also grew up in a house with no running water, behind the general store his immigrant parents ran in present-day Zambia. Confirmation by the U.S. Senate would propel Fischer, 70, to the No. 2 spot at the world’s most powerful central bank.
In this new role, the former head of the Bank of Israel and the International Monetary Fund’s chief firefighter during the Asian financial crisis would face a fresh challenge: helping incoming Fed chief Janet Yellen manage the wind-down of the central bank’s bond buying without sabotaging the U.S. recovery.
Yellen, who won Senate confirmation on Monday to be the next Fed chair, is set to take the reins from Ben Bernanke once his term ends on January 31.
On Friday, Obama nominated Fischer to replace Yellen and nominated Lael Brainard, who recently served as the Treasury Department’s top official for international affairs, to serve on the Fed board. The president also nominated Fed Governor Jerome Powell to a new term on the board.
Fischer, who has both U.S. and Israeli citizenship, spent eight years running the Bank of Israel, retiring three years into his second five-year term in June. He was the second-in-command at the IMF from 1994-2001, and before that chief economist at the World Bank.
He taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for many years, where his students included Bernanke, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, and at least half a dozen other well-known economists and policymakers including former Obama adviser Lawrence Summers and Gregory Mankiw, who served as an adviser to President George W. Bush.
“The guy has got a lot of seniority, a tremendous amount of international experience,” said Jerry Webman, chief economist at OppenheimerFunds in New York. “Bringing in the international component … acknowledges there’s a feedback effect with monetary policy, currency (and) foreign monetary policy.”
Fischer’s recent and influential role in a foreign government could raise some eyebrows among the U.S. senators who would need to confirm him before he can take office.
So too could his time in the private sector. He was a vice chairman at Citigroup in the mid-2000s when it was the biggest bank in the world. During the financial crisis, Citi was among the institutions that received a U.S. government bailout.
SEES IT, CALLS IT
Often described as mild-mannered and genial, Fischer can also be prickly and forthright.
Last June, after then-Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz announced a plan to double Israel’s budget deficit target to 3 percent, Fischer warned the move could weaken the economy and force the central bank to raise interest rates.
“The last time this happened, we had to run to our rich uncle for guarantees,” he chided, referring to U.S. loan guarantees extended to recession-hit Israel in 2003. “But there is a problem with our rich uncle today: He’s not so rich and not as friendly.”
At the Bank of Israel, Fischer’s rate decisions often surprised markets, and sometimes went against the advice of his top officials. His decision in November 2008 to cut the policy rate by half a percentage point, for instance, had the support of only one of the five senior officials who consulted with him on the move.
“He calls it as he sees it,” said Bill Rhodes, former senior vice chairman at Citigroup who worked closely with Fischer when he was at the IMF. “And like everyone else, sometimes he’s wrong, but his policies have worked out very well in that eight-year period at the Bank of Israel.”
FINANCIAL CRISES
Fischer was born in what was then Northern Rhodesia, the son of Latvian and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. When he was 13, his family moved to what is now Zimbabwe. In his last year of high school, he took a course in economics that hooked him for life.
He went on to study at the London School of Economics and then MIT, where he later became a professor. It was there, in 1977, that he famously argued that monetary policy can effectively boost employment, a hotly contested notion which is still controversial in some circles.
A two-and-a-half-year stint as chief economist at the World Bank whetted his appetite for policy work, and when he returned to MIT, he found it hard to re-adjust to academia.
“I remember going to theory seminars and saying to myself, what difference does it make whether this guy is right or wrong, why should anyone care about that theorem and so forth,” he told Olivier Blanchard, a former student and now the IMF’s chief economist, in a 2004 interview.
In 1994, Fischer got his chance to return to policymaking: Summers, who was then a top U.S. Treasury official, helped recruit him to be deputy managing director at the IMF.
Fischer played a big role in the IMF’s bailout of Mexico after the peso crashed in 1994, and he helped to arrange huge IMF loan packages for South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Russia during the Asian financial crisis that began in 1997.
His IMF term ended in 2001, and after a failed bid to lead the IMF, he became vice chairman at Citigroup.
In December 2005, while celebrating his wedding anniversary in the Caribbean, Fischer got a call: would he consider running the Bank of Israel, then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked.
Fischer jumped at the chance to return to the policy world.
Two years into the job, the financial crisis hit, and he responded by cutting the policy rate on October 7, 2008, a day ahead of similar moves by major central banks.
He was also the first central banker to raise rates, in 2009, after the worst of the crisis had passed for Israel.
In 2011, he established a six-person monetary policy committee that would vote on rate decisions that had before then been entirely his call.
But he continued his policy of doing what he thought best until the very end. Last May, at his next-to-last policy-setting meeting, Fischer used his double-vote to break a tie, opting for a smaller cut than half the panel members had wanted.
Israel’s economy has fared better than many since the crisis, in part because the Bank of Israel bought billions of dollars to keep Israel’s shekel currency from strengthening too much when the Fed launched its second round of bond purchases to push U.S. borrowing costs down. That program spurred investors to pour money into emerging economies, driving many of those currencies sharply higher.
But unlike officials in many other emerging economies, Fischer did not chastise the Fed for its super-easy policy; in fact, he called criticism of the U.S. policy “misplaced.”
More recently, Fischer has offered mixed assessments of the Fed’s bond-buying, calling it ugly and dangerous, but also effective and necessary.
“We really need to get back to more normal conditions, more normal monetary policy in the United States,” he said in August.
The Fed took its first step in that direction when it decided in December to reduce its monthly assets purchases to $75 billion from $85 billion, with a view to ending them sometime late in 2014.
Fischer also appears to have conflicting views on the other main tool the Fed is using to influence the economy these days – so-called forward guidance on how long it will keep interest rates at their current near-zero level.
“You can’t expect the Fed to spell out what it’s going to do,” he said earlier this year, “because it doesn’t know.”
– REUTERS
Social media critic Martins Vincent Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan (VDM), has released what he described as his first piece of evidence after the Nigeria Police Force challenged him to substantiate his allegations that some police officers allegedly collaborate with kidnappers.
VDM released a video on his Instagram handle on Thursday, August 27, 2026, shortly after the police invited him to provide evidence supporting the claims he made at the 66th Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in Port Harcourt.
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The activist captioned the video: “My evidence number 1.”
Recalled that VDM, who was a panellist at the NBA conference on Tuesday, had alleged that some police officers manning checkpoints along major highways provide kidnappers and bandits with information about travellers.
According to him, the officers allegedly relay details about the identities and movements of travellers to criminal groups, thereby facilitating abductions for ransom.
The allegation triggered a response from the Nigeria Police Force, which denied the claim and challenged VDM to substantiate his allegations.
The police invitation came as the force sought evidence to support the serious claims made by the social media critic.
In response, VDM released the video, describing it as his “evidence number 1”, signalling that he may provide further material to support his allegations.
The development has continued to attract attention, with the controversy placing renewed focus on allegations of possible collaboration between security personnel and criminal groups involved in kidnapping and banditry.
A former Permanent Secretary of the Federal Civil Service Commission, Goke Adeboroye, has questioned how an alleged fake presidential agency was able to gain access to government facilities, budgetary provisions and office space without being detected.
Adeboroye spoke on Channels Television’s Inside Sources following the discovery of the alleged Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission.
SEE MORE: $1m Extortion Scheme: Fake EFCC Officials Arrested In Plot Against Former NPA MD
The ICPC had said the purported agency had no legal basis and operated with forged appointment letters and other official documents.
The commission also said its alleged Director-General, Adeniyi Matthew, was never appointed by the Federal Government.
The anti-corruption agency further disclosed that its investigation into the PFIPC led to the discovery of the National Brands Development and Made in Nigeria Special Project Office, which it alleged was operating within the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation without proper authorisation.
Reacting to the development, Adeboroye described the situation as a major failure of the government’s bureaucratic system.
“The exposure of that fake presidential agency is a major lapse to say that somebody can actually come into the system, get in on the budget, get offices, and all of that,” he said.
The former permanent secretary identified weaknesses in the bureaucratic structures supporting key offices in the Presidency, including the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the Office of the Chief of Staff to the President and the Office of the Head of the Civil Service.
According to him, the bureaucracy in these offices should be strong enough to support the President’s policies while also ensuring that fraudulent or unlawful directives do not gain effect.
“The bureaucracy in those offices are not strong enough to be able to help the President drive the vision at the speed and with the efficiency that he wants,” Adeboroye said.
He also stressed the importance of having professional and experienced civil servants who can scrutinise directives issued by political office holders.
Adeboroye said civil servants should be able to recognise suspicious communications purportedly coming from the Presidency because they are familiar with the official channels through which presidential approvals are transmitted.
“Whether the person brings fake or whatever, you as the civil servant should be trained to be able to detect what should be a genuine communication from the State House. You work in that system,” he said.
He explained that presidential approvals usually pass through established channels involving senior government officials.
“When the President approves anything, he always minutes to about three people. He goes to the Chief of Staff, he goes to SGF, and if he has something to do with civil service, the Head of Service will have it.”
Adeboroye recalled an incident from his time as Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Interior involving a former governor who claimed to have presidential approval for a diplomatic passport.
He said the then Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Ude, cross-checked the purported approval before taking action and subsequently sought clarification on whether the former governor, who was no longer in office, should receive the diplomatic passport.
“That’s somebody using the experience of the system to ensure that you are not outplayed,” he said.
The former permanent secretary said similar verification could have been carried out in the alleged fake agency case through a simple phone call to the relevant government offices.
“So we would have expected that on a simple phone call, when I was working in the office of Ekaite, Secretary of Government, I could pick a phone, call any minister, call this, it’s just a phone call from the office of whoever to say, Chief of Staff, is this true? And that would have actually corrected it,” he said.
Meanwhile, the controversy surrounding the National Brands Development and Made in Nigeria Special Project Office has continued.
The chairman of the project office, Musa Aliyu, had alleged that the office was allocated space within the OSGF premises without presidential authorisation.
However, the National Coordinator and Executive Director of the project office, George Nwabueze, denied the allegation, insisting that the office is a project office under the OSGF and has existed for 16 years.
Nwabueze also produced an appointment letter purportedly issued by the OSGF, conveying approval of his appointment as National Coordinator/Executive Director of the Made in Nigeria Project Office.
The conflicting claims have continued to raise questions about the authorisation and status of the project office and the alleged involvement of public officials in its operations.
The Labour Party has commended former President Goodluck Jonathan for conceding defeat in the 2015 presidential election, saying his decision demonstrated that political power was not worth the blood of Nigerians.
The National Chairman of the Labour Party, Senator Nenadi Usman, made the statement on Tuesday in Bauchi State while speaking with journalists on the sidelines of the 2026 Goodluck Jonathan Foundation Democracy Dialogue.
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The event, organised by the Goodluck Jonathan Foundation, was themed, “Beyond Elections: Can Political Parties and the Judiciary Save African Democracy?”
Usman said Nigeria’s democracy survived the tensions surrounding the 2015 election because Jonathan chose to put the national interest above his desire to remain in office.
She said, “Nigeria’s democracy survived the doomsday predictions of bookmakers in 2015 because of President Jonathan’s concession of defeat in that year’s election, even before the final votes were tallied.”
According to her, Jonathan’s approach to politics was exceptional, particularly because he had consistently maintained that neither his election nor remaining in power was worth the blood of any Nigerian.
Usman stated, “Such a principled approach to politics had never before been witnessed on the Nigerian political horizon. Jonathan, from the inception of his presidency, consistently maintained that neither his election nor remaining in power was worth the blood of any Nigerian.”
She added that Jonathan demonstrated the sincerity of his position when the 2015 election tested his commitment to the principle.
The Labour Party chairman urged politicians preparing for the 2027 general elections to emulate Jonathan’s non-violent approach to politics, respect democratic rules and place national interest above personal ambitions.
She also questioned whether politicians seeking the presidency in 2027 would be prepared to make similar sacrifices for national unity, particularly amid inflammatory rhetoric from some political camps.
Usman further recalled the saying attributed to Warren Buffett that someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
She argued that Nigerians are able to practise democracy today partly because Jonathan made sacrifices at a critical moment.
On the Labour Party’s preparations for the 2027 elections, Usman described the party as the most structured opposition political party in Nigeria.
She said the Labour Party’s relationship with the Nigeria Labour Congress and the Trade Union Congress had strengthened its political structure nationwide.
Usman claimed that the party remained the only opposition party with a realistic presence across Nigeria’s 186,000 polling units.
She said, “With the combined strength of the NLC and the TUC, both of which are constitutional members of the party, no Nigerian political party is better positioned to show the APC government the exit door than the Labour Party.”
The democracy dialogue attracted several political leaders and dignitaries, including former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan, former Vice-President Namadi Sambo, Bauchi State Governor Bala Mohammed, former Senate President Anyim Pius Anyim and Labour Party’s 2023 presidential candidate, Peter Obi.
Others included former Plateau State Governor Jonah Jang, APC Deputy National Chairman, South, Dr Ben Nwoye, and the Emir of Bauchi, Dr Rilwanu Suleiman Adamu.
The dialogue provided a platform for discussions on strengthening democratic institutions, the role of political parties and the judiciary, and preventing democratic reversals across Africa.
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