SBP editorial: New Central Bank chief must keep a firm hand on the tiller

Gabriel Makhlouf

Few people remember Bill Martin, the chair of the US Federal Reserve between 1951 and 1970 – through the presidencies of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. But they’ll no doubt know his famous old description of a central banker as “the chaperone who has ordered the punch bowl removed just when the party was really warming up”.

What he meant was that the job was to ...