Culture shock

摘要

CHRISTINE LAGARDE has been an outsider before. Speaking to The Economist, she relishes the memory of shaking up bureaucrats-"men in grey suits"-when she took over as France's finance minister in 2007. She even installed a "psychedelic" carpet in her office, to get them to look up from the floor. Now Ms Lagarde, who then went on to run the IMF, is shaking up the idea of what it is to be a top central banker. The main prerequisite used to be a degree of nerdiness: just think of Janet Yellen, a former chairwoman of the Federal Reserve and Joe Biden's choice for treasury secretary (see next story); Ben Bernanke, her predecessor at the Fed; or Mervyn King, a former governor of the Bank of England. All spent decades in academia. By contrast Ms Lagarde, who has been the head of the European Central Bank (ECB) for just over a year, is not an economist but a lawyer and a former executive and politician. She brings a glittering cv and a high public profile to the job, but is probably more comfortable rubbing shoulders with heads of state than participating in a research seminar.