FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: A man walks past Bank of Japan's headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, June 17, 2022. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo/File Photo/File Photo/File Photo
NEW YORK: Stanley Fischer’s school of central bank leadership has a new graduate.
Before he served as vice-chair of the Federal Reserve (Fed), Fischer, 79, taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he had earned his own PhD.
Among his students were Ben S. Bernanke, who would go on to become Fed chair, and Mario Draghi, a future European Central Bank president. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers also studied under him.
Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe earned his Ph.D. at MIT when Fischer was there, and Lowe’s former deputy Guy Debelle was the last graduate student Fischer supervised. Onetime Bank of England governor Mervyn King also taught at MIT, where he had an adjoining office with Bernanke.
Now, another pupil is set to take one of central banking’s top jobs. Kazuo Ueda is expected to be named the next governor of the Bank of Japan (BoJ).
Ueda completed his PhD at MIT in 1980, before going on to a mainly academic career that also featured a seven-year stint on the BoJ’s board.
“We can think of him as being Japan’s Ben Bernanke,” Summers told Bloomberg Television’s “Wall Street Week” with David Westin.
“He studied at MIT at about the same time that Ben did, with the same thesis adviser that Ben Bernanke had. He specialised in similar areas of monetary economics, and has a soft spoken academic way about him, but is also capable of being decisive.”
A former economics lecturer at the University of Tokyo – where he got his undergraduate degree – Ueda, 71, is now a professor at Kyoritsu Women’s University.
He served as a BoJ board member from 1998-2005 when the central bank introduced a zero interest rate policy for the first time and embarked on quantitative easing.
Bernanke, similarly, had a career in academia prior to joining the Fed board and later taking the helm of the central bank.
“He comes with a strong pedigree,” said Ilya Spivak, head of global macro at tastylive, a financial network. “There are a lot of big central bankers that came up under Fischer.”
It’s something of an unusual pedigree for a BoJ chief, who is usually drawn from the ranks of career BoJ or Finance Ministry bureaucrats. — Bloomberg
