Stanley Fischer
Governor, Bank of Israel
New York, USA

"Estimates of the number of poor people in the world who use microfinance range from 70 million to 750 million. One of the goals of the International Year of Microcredit is to improve statistics on the nature and scale of the penetration of microfinance. But the essential goal is to strengthen and spread the availability of good financial services, which offer the possibility and the hope to many poor people of improving their own situations through their own efforts."

Stanley Fischer joined Citigroup in February 2002. Prior to joining Citigroup, Mr. Fischer was the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. Before he joined the Fund, Mr. Fischer was the Killian Professor and Head of the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From January 1988 to August 1990 he was Vice President, Development Economics and Chief Economist at the World Bank. He has also held consulting appointments with the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Treasury, and the Bank of Israel. Mr. Fischer holds a B.Sc (Econ) and M.Sc. (Econ) from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in economics from MIT. He was Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago until 1973.

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