Meet the front-runners to replace Lagarde

FRANKFURT — The race to replace Christine Lagarde has reached fever pitch after she officially announced her intention to depart the European Central Bank in February next year. The two leading contenders are familiar figures from the eurozone’s central banking circuit: Spain’s Pablo Hernández de Cos, a measured economist with a reputation for quiet authority, and Dutchman Klaas Knot, a former hawk whose years on the ECB’s governing council left a more complicated legacy. A recent Bloomberg survey of economists gives de Cos a slender lead: 12 respondents picked him, against nine for Knot. The survey offers a snapshot of expert preferences, not a forecast of the outcome.