Christine Lagarde was born in Paris in 1956, trained as a lawyer and built an international career at the law firm Baker & McKenzie, where she became the first female chair, before serving as France's finance minister from 2007 to 2011 — the first woman to hold the role in a G7 country. She was managing director of the International Monetary Fund from 2011 to 2019 and has been president of the European Central Bank since November 2019.
Her tenure at the ECB has spanned the pandemic emergency response, the launch of the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme, the eurozone's first sustained inflation episode in a generation and the subsequent tightening cycle. Under her leadership the bank has also pushed forward work on a possible digital euro and on the climate-risk dimensions of monetary policy.
Lagarde is regarded as a uniquely diplomatic public communicator at the head of an institution whose decisions move sovereign-bond markets across nineteen member states.