Will current Bank of Israel head Stanley Fischer be leaving Israel for the New York Fed? According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Fischer is considered to be a dark horse to fill the vacancy left by Timothy Geithner, who is joining Pres. elect Barack Obama as Treasury Secretary.

According to the Journal, “Outsiders who could be considered include Peter Fisher, a former Treasury official who is now a senior executive at BlackRock Inc.; Stanley Fischer, an economist who runs Israel’s central bank; and Roger Ferguson, a former deputy Fed chairman who is now chief executive of TIAA-CREF, an investment firm that specializes in serving academic institutions.”

The question is whether if this is so, does this mean the Israeli economy is about to go into the gutter. Fischer has a history of bailing out just in the nick of

If the new president looked a little, well, burdened on election night, chances are he’s aging a couple of years in the six-hour span between the release of unemployment figures this morning and his first news conference as president-elect this afternoon.

6.5% unemployment in October — worst since early Clintontime.  Worse still were the revisions of the August and September numbers.  And as Karl Denninger noticed, the number of unemployed plus the number of people working part-time who’d like to work full-time now tops 11%.  (And who knows what the real figure would turn out to be once John Williams applies Carter-era standards to the numbers.)

As I write, the president-elect is meeting with his “Transition Economic Advisory Board,” his temporary brain trust as it were.  The names on the panel are, well, interesting.  Some of the faces from I.O.U.S.A. are there.  But one has to wonder if