Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer has resigned effective on or around Oct. 13 after serving three years at the U.S. central bank.
Fischer, 73, was appointed to the Fed by President Barack Obama in 2014 to a term as vice chair that would have expired in June 2018. He cited "personal reasons" in a Sept. 6 resignation letter to President Donald Trump, released Wednesday by the central bank.
Fischer is leaving before his term expires in June next year, and that in effect gives Trump scope to remake the leadership of the Federal Reserve Board. Janet Yellen's term as chair expires in February. Trump has said that a renomination of Yellen is under consideration, though the White House is also looking at other candidates.
Advertisement
Fischer is an elder statesman of American finance. He is a former vice chairman of Citigroup, the former first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and the former chief economist of the World Bank. He also served as governor of the Bank of Israel from 2005 to 2013. For more than 20 years, he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he influenced generations of economists, from former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi.