President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday appointed Hafize Gaye Erkan, a finance executive in the United States, to head Turkey's central bank as it prepares to reverse course and tighten policy after years of rate cuts and a simmering cost-of-living crisis, Reuters reports.
Erkan, former co-CEO at First Republic Bank and managing director at Goldman Sachs, takes the reins after Erdogan's reelection on May 28 and just under a week after he signaled a pivot away from unorthodoxy with a new cabinet.
The fifth central bank chief in four years, the 43-year-old replaces Sahap Kavcioglu, who spearheaded Erdogan's rate-cutting drive that set off a historic currency crash in 2021 and sent inflation to a 24-year peak above 85% last year.
The announcement of Erkan's appointment in the Official Gazette was accompanied by a decision to appoint Kavcioglu as head of the country's BDDK banking watchdog.
Erkan's leanings are unclear given she has no formal monetary policy experience in her career spanning Wall Street and U.S. corporate boardrooms. She has a Ph.D. from Princeton University in financial engineering.
She was at First Republic from 2014 to 2021, according to her LinkedIn profile. This year, it became the largest U.S. bank to fail since 2008 after it was seized by regulators and sold to JPMorgan.
