AMECHI Ogbonna 
The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), 
Christine Lagarde,  yesterday resigned from the Fund to head the European Central Bank.
In a statement, she said: “I am honored to have been nominated for the Presidency of the European Central Bank. In light of this, and in consultation with the Ethics Committee of the IMF Executive Board, I have decided to temporarily relinquish my responsibilities as Managing Director of the IMF during the nomination period.”
The European Council  officially nominated Lagarde for the position. She would succeed Mario Draghi. Lagarde has led the IMF since 2011.
Lagarde will take up the position of head of the European Central Bank as a self-confessed economic outsider who has preferred to emphasise her ability as a listener and tough negotiator during her seven years as managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
If confirmed, Lagarde would take over a central bank struggling to jolt economic growth in Europe. 
A lawyer by training, the former French finance minister is credited with turning around the Washington-based IMF after it was thrown into turmoil by the abrupt resignation of her predecessor Dominique Strauss-Kahn following unproven allegations of sexual assault and attempted rape. 
Lagarde, 63, was confronted by an organisation that had not only lost its leader in regrettable circumstances, but was also hampered by warring factions at odds over policymaking after being blindsided by the 2008 financial crisis.
Unlike Kahn, who was preparing to return to his native France to challenge François Hollande as the left’s anti-austerity presidential candidate, Lagarde’s background was in Conservative politics. Before joining the IMF, she was finance minister in Nicolas Sarkozy’s right of centre government.
Lagarde had earlier admitted: “I’m not the top-notch economist; I can understand what people talk about, I have enough common sense for that, and I’ve studied a bit of economics, but I’m not a super-duper economist.
“But, yes, that appreciation for the interests pursued by the other side at a negotiation table, a sense of the collective interest and how that can transcend the vested individual interests of the members, that matters.”
When she was asked to choose between the IMF factions that backed austerity measures and those that favoured expansionist policies, she appeared to give her blessing to austerity.
She publicly backed the then UK chancellor George Osborne and the German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, the architects of Europe’s austerity policies, and advised nations to pay down their debts.
But it was a different story behind the scenes. Her support for writing off most of Greece’s debts in return for reforms was overruled and she came to urge governments to use their spending power to ease the burden on the poor and invest in environmentally friendly infrastructure.
Born in Paris in 1956, she is the eldest daughter of a university lecturer and a teacher. 
Lagarde’s diplomatic skills are legendary at the IMF and will prove essential at a time when expectations of central banker power are at an all-time high. They are among the most prominent policymakers around, even though their ability to turbo-charge economic growth, now that interest are already at rock-bottom levels, is running low.
Possible successors at the IMF include Pierre Moscovici, the outgoing European commissioner for economic and financial affairs and the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, who leaves his post next January and, until recently, combined his job with running the G20s financial stability watchdog.
Lagarde’s nomination now passes to a vote at the broader European Parliament as well as between the euro zone finance ministers. However, this is more of a symbolical step as the heads of state have the final say on the ECB presidency.
European Council President Donald Tusk, who chairs the EU summits between the 28 heads of state, told CNBC that Lagarde’s past as a finance minister does not put at risk the independence of the ECB. The central bank is meant to be totally independent from political interference.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told CNBC in Brussels that Lagarde is a “tough lady.”
“I know Christine Lagarde as the boss of the IMF, I know her as a tough lady, as somebody who knows what she wants, who is very clear on giving directions, when you come to her to get a loan, (she is) very tough on conditions, so I wouldn’t like to be the European country who needs to go to the ECB asking for favors.”