No new term for central bank chief, says Mexico president

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico President ruled out asking country's central bank chief to serve for another term. The president said that he would replace him with an economist with "a social dimension."

Alejandro Diaz de Leon's stint at the helm of the Bank of Mexico is due to finish at the end of this year.

His replacement "is going to be an economist with a social dimension, very in favor of the moral economy," said Lopez Obrador, a left-wing populist who often rails against neoliberalism.

Obrador has already appointed two of the five members of the central bank's governing board -- former banking executive Jonathan Heath and academic Gerardo Esquivel, who was part of his election campaign team.

Diaz de Leon, who has a master's degree from the Yale School of Management, took the reins of the central bank in December 2017, tasked with taming inflation.

He has overseen a series of interest rate cuts since the start of the coronavirus pandemic last year in an attempt to steer Latin America's second-largest economy out of a major slump.

(With inputs from agencies)