getting a liberal education far beyond the required curriculum of college. eventually i returned to nyu, took additional courses at night, and completed my doctorate. over the past six decades i followed a type of career path that many of you will follow, but with a twenty - first - century cast. i had two careers and four jobs - one as a musician, one as a private consultant, and two in government. but the world has changed since i was your age, and the pace of change has quickened. today it is rare that one will finish school and then engage in the same job until retirement, which was the general experience of generations past. many of you will switch professions once, possibly many times. almost all of you will have several jobs, some many jobs. to succeed, you will soon learn, as i did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills. but beyond that you will need to acquire the on - the - job skills that you will need as you move from one job to another. at some point, almost all of you will lose a job and will want to be reemployed as quickly and as productively as possible. that means you will need the capability of learning a wholly new activity. the current workforce is increasingly turning to community colleges to prepare for new professions and new jobs. today, almost a third of those enrolled in community colleges are thirty years old and older. so - called adult education was a rarity in my youth ; today it is widespread. most of you probably will be engaged in some form of learning through most of your working lives. already numerous corporations have regularly scheduled classes in basic and advanced subjects directly and indirectly related to job requirements. such corporate universities, as they are called, are growing rapidly, and i suspect that, as you join the workforce, you will have the sensation that you never left school. that is why it is so critical that you productively employ your current learning experiences to create the base capabilities necessary for continuing your education into your mature years. learning, of course, need not be formal. you can engage in it on your own. in generations past, much learning occurred outside a classroom. i am fascinated by the eloquent and literate letters written by some civil war enlisted personnel, who i doubt had formal schooling beyond the age of ten. many of these soldiers obviously learned to read and discovered a whole new world of ideas

stanley fischer : central bank lessons from the global crisis dinner lecture by professor stanley fischer, governor of the bank of israel, at the bank of israel conference on “ lessons of the global crisis ”, jerusalem, 31 march 2011. this lecture is slightly modified from a series of lectures given during recent months : the brahmananda lecture at the reserve bank of india in february 2011 ; a lecture at the cepr / esi conference in izmir on october 28, 2010 ; and a lecture at the conference of the cyprus economic society in october 2010. i am grateful to colleagues at the bank of israel with whom i have discussed and lived through the issues of monetary policy during the last five years, and to joshua schneck of the bank of israel for research assistance. * * * during and after the great depression, many central bankers and economists concluded that monetary policy could not be used to stimulate economic activity in a situation in which the interest rate was essentially zero, as it was in the united states during the 1930s – a situation that later became known as the liquidity trap. in the united states it was also a situation in which the financial system was grievously damaged. it was only in 1963, with the publication of friedman and schwartz ’ s monetary history of the united states that the profession as a whole1 began to accept the contrary view, that “ the contraction is in fact a testimonial to the importance of monetary forces ”. 2 twenty years later, in 1983, ben bernanke presented the view that it was the breakdown of the credit system that was the critical feature of the great depression3 – that it was the credit side of the banks ’ balance sheets, the failure or inability to make a sufficient volume of loans, rather than the behavior of the money supply per se, that was primarily responsible for the breakdown of the monetary transmission mechanism during the great depression. the bernanke thesis gained adherents over the years, and must recently have gained many more as a result of the great recession. in this lecture, i present preliminary lessons – ten of them – for monetary and financial policy from the great recession. i do this with some trepidation, since it is possible that there will later be an eleventh lesson : that given that it took fifty years for the profession to develop its current understanding of the monetary policy transmission mechanism during the great depression, just two and a half years after the lehmann brothers bankruptcy is too early to be drawing even preliminary lessons from the