When news came about Stanley Fischer having passed away, I got emotional. I am penning these lines in the hope that people will learn about this unique human being. He was a three-dimensional Donald Bradman, a pinnacle reached by very few — indeed I don’t know of any other. First, he was every (wo)man’s economist. It is impossible for a student of macroeconomics to not have heard of him, and learnt from him. His Macroeconomics with Rudi Dornbusch is the go-to textbook if you want to understand macroeconomics.

His students included our own Isher Ahluwalia (his second PhD supervision), a pre-eminent Indian macroeconomist and institution builder. Other formal PhD students have included Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the US Fed, Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, and Kazuo Ueda, present governor of the Bank of Japan. If that is not a lifetime’s achievement award by itself, consider that among his students were Lawrence H Summers, former secretary of the US Treasury and president of Harvard University, and two chairpersons of the US Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer and Greg Mankiw.

In a fundamental way, all policy economists were his students. In several seminars/discussions where I had the good........

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