Ex-Amazon economist Fatih Karahan is new Turkish Central Bank chief

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has appointed former Amazon senior economist Fatih Karahan as the new head of the Central Bank.

Karahan replaces Hafize Gaye Erkan, a former Wall Street executive who earlier on Friday said in a statement that she had "requested from the president to be pardoned" from her duties.

Erkan, in a post on social media platform X on Friday, reminded that she has been serving as the Governor of Türkiye's Central Bank since June 8, 2023.

"In order to serve our state and nation, I have worked tirelessly day and night. At this point, our economic program has started to bear fruit. The increase in our reserves, economic indicators, and indicators of the main trend of inflation are evidence of this success."

"I owe my gratitude to the Minister of Treasury and Finance, who enabled me to experience the pride of being the first female governor of Türkiye's Central Bank and to my colleagues whom I have been working together for almost 9 months with great dedication day and night," she added.

Karahan, 42, was deputy governor of the bank since July 28. He graduated from the mathematics and industrial engineering department at Türkiye's Bogazici University and has a doctoral degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

He previously served as an economist, a team leader of labor and product market studies and a monetary policy advisor with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Serving also as a lecturer at Columbia and New York Universities, he became a senior economist at Amazon and was appointed principal economist with the company.