The leaders of the Union European ratified the appointment of Christine Lagarde as president of the European Central Bank European on Friday. Lagarde responded with a tweet and a picture of herself with Mario Draghi, the current ECB president.
“My sincere thanks to the European leaders. It is an honour to succeed Mario Draghi. I look forward to working with the talented staff of the ECB to keep prices in the eurozone stable and banks safe,” she wrote.
The official appointment of the 63-year-old Lagarde was only a formality. At the beginning of July it was already clear that the former French finance minister and IMF chief will be at the helm of monetary policy for the euro countries for the next eight years. Her designation was part of a broader agreement among the leaders on the distribution of top European jobs.
The ECB has its seat in Frankfurt and has 3,500 employees. The Executive Board of the ECB is responsible for the implementation of euro area monetary policy, as established by the Governing Council of the ECB. It is composed of the President, the Vice President and four other members, all appointed for a non-renewable term of 8 years. The governing council is composed of six members of the executive board and the governors of the national central banks of the euro area member states.
Christine Lagarde was born in Paris in 1956, graduated in law from the Paris X University law school and earned a master’s degree from the Aix-en-Provence Institute of Political Science. As a lawyer, she joined Baker McKenzie’s international law firm as an associate, specialising in Labour, Antitrust and Mergers and Acquisitions.
In 1995, she became a member of the Company’s Executive Committee and in 1999 became Chairman of the Baker McKenzie Global Executive Committee and, later in 2004, Chairman of the Global Strategic Committee.
Lagarde took office in June 2005 as French Foreign Minister. Following a brief spell as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in June 2007, she became the first woman to hold the position of Minister of Finance and Economy of a G-7 country.
On July 5, 2011, Christine Lagarde became the IMF’s eleventh managing director and the first woman to hold the position and was elected for a second term on July 5, 2016.
She takes up her position as ECB chief on November 1.
