Mentor of Central Bankers Fischer Rues Complacency in New Growth

Stanley Fischer in December 2008 connected the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bernard Madoff’s ruinous $20 billion fraud to a false sense of security that brought the world to the brink of depression. Three years later, he rues the same creeping complacency.

“Nobody should be relaxing at this stage,” Fischer, governor of the Bank of Israel, said in a Feb. 20 interview in his Jerusalem office. “It’s important that we keep asking what can go wrong next, because something will go wrong somewhere, sometime, and it’s important to try to anticipate where and what it might be.”