BLK BlackRock Inc

By Nick Timiraos 

This article is being republished as part of our daily reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S. print edition of The Wall Street Journal (February 14, 2019).

Former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer will join BlackRock Inc. as a senior adviser, the asset manager said Wednesday.

Mr. Fischer is joining the BlackRock Investment Institute, the investment analysis division of the world's largest asset manager.

Mr. Fischer's appointment will "help us discern the trends, identify the inflection points and understand the interlocking intricacy of assets, markets and economies," said BlackRock executives Laurence Fink and Philipp Hildebrand in a company memo announcing Mr. Fischer's hiring on Wednesday.

In 2014, President Barack Obama tapped Mr. Fischer, a luminary in central banking who previously served as the head of the Bank of Israel, to serve as the Fed's No. 2 official. He resigned his four-year term for personal reasons in Oct. 2017.

During a career as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Fischer taught many leading policy makers. His students included European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. He also held senior posts at the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Citigroup Inc.

As a key member of former Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen's inner circle of decision makers, Mr. Fischer pushed to gradually unwind the central bank's postcrisis policies, including by raising short-term interest rates after holding them near zero for many years.

More recently, Mr. Fischer has warned against efforts to roll back postcrisis banking regulation.

Write to Nick Timiraos at nick.timiraos@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 14, 2019 02:47 ET (07:47 GMT)

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