NEWS has just come through that Maurice Obstfeld will be the International Monetary Fund's new chief economist, succeeding Olivier Blanchard who is retiring. According to those in the know, Mr Obstfeld was chosen from an exceptionally strong field of candidates, which is a tribute to the role Mr Blanchard has played. Mr Obstfeld ("Maury" to his friends) has both academic experience (he is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley) and policy chops (he is on Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, where apparently he has done a lot of good work). To most economists he is known for his "Foundations of International Macroeconomics", a go-to textbook for master's students on macroeconomics courses that he wrote with Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr Rogoff told The Economist that it was "a great appointment".

So what should we to expect from Mr Obstfeld's tenure? At this stage we can only speculate. He has written on how the establishment of the euro zone led to overlending from the core to the periphery. In a lecture in 2013 he seemed sceptical of the benefits from growth in global finance, saying that "the global crisis has highlighted questions about potential negative externalities from financial markets".

What is clear is that living up to Mr Blanchard will be difficult. One insider remarked that while Mr Obstfeld should do "much better than his co-author Rogoff did as Director at the Fund in terms of getting good results [and] influencing the Board...no one is Blanchard. Any economist in the world would have a huge gap to do even part of what Blanchard accomplished."