Bankers increasingly hired for their global insight

[LONDON] A packed passport appears to be a pre-requisite to running a modern central bank.

Less than a year since Mark Carney swapped the governorship of the Bank of Canada for that of the Bank of England (BOE), Nemat Shafik of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was named one of his deputies on Tuesday. Her hiring comes the same month that the European Central Bank (ECB) picked Canadian Julie Dickson to help oversee banks and as former Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer and ex-US Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs Lael Brainard prepare to join the Federal Reserve.

The search for policymakers with global insight reflects how economies and financial markets are increasingly buffeted by events abroad, including banking turmoil, quantitative easing in the US, earthquakes in Japan, debt crises in Europe and geopolitics in Russia. They also face longer-term trends such as the growing power of emerging markets and the need to better regulate banks across borders.