Washington | Replacing Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell with board member Lael Brainard would move climate change up the central bank’s agenda while guaranteeing a steady interest rates policy, her old friend and former Reserve Bank of Australia board member Warwick McKibbin says.

Professor McKibbin, who has known Ms Brainard since Harvard graduate school in the 1980s and from their time at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said Ms Brainard would ensure continuity of policy if she became only the second woman to hold the top job at the world’s most influential central bank.