ISTANBUL, Feb 5 (Reuters) - President Tayyip Erdogan has appointed Turkey's sixth central bank governor in the last five years, naming Fatih Karahan to the post hours after Hafize Gaye Erkan unexpectedly resigned late on Friday after only eight months as chief.

Erkan cited a need to protect her family from what she called a media smear campaign. She had aggressively hiked interest rates to 45% from 8.5% since June, attracting some of the world's top foreign investors after a years-long exodus.

Karahan had been deputy at the bank and is expected to carry on the policy stance, which is meant to cool annual inflation that hit 65% last month and should begin dipping around mid-year due to the policy tightening.

The rotating cast of governors has damaged the central bank's credibility in years past given most of the departures - though not apparently Erkan's - were over policy disagreements with Erdogan, who had urged low rates.

Here is a brief overview of the last six chiefs:

FATIH KARAHAN (SINCE FEB. 3, 2024)

Karahan became deputy governor at Turkey's central bank in July last year, playing an important role formulating the tight policy. Early on Saturday, Erdogan appointed him governor.

On Sunday, he pledged to wrestle inflation down to target. "We stand ready to act in case of any deterioration in the inflation outlook," he said in his first remarks as chief.

Born in 1982, Karahan holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and began his career in 2012 as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he later became a monetary policy advisor.

In 2022 he joined Amazon, where he was later appointed principal economist there.

He also holds a degree from Istanbul's Bogazici University.

HAFIZE GAYE ERKAN (JUNE 9, 2023-FEB. 2, 2024)

A former U.S. bank executive, Erkan was the first woman to run Turkey's central bank. After Erdogan's re-election in May, he named her to the post to conduct a U-turn away from his years of easy money in the face of soaring inflation.

In the last policy meeting she led last month, the bank hiked rates by another 250 basis points and said it had tightened enough to achieve disinflation, signalling a halt.

When Erkan quit she cited a "reputation assassination". Last month, opposition newspaper Sozcu published an article about a central bank employee who said she was wrongfully dismissed from the bank by Erkan's father, who has no formal role at the bank but was said to have spent time there helping the governor care for her young child.

In response at the time, Erkan said that an "unfounded" news story targeting her, her family and the bank was "unacceptable" and vowed to exercise her legal rights against those responsible.

Like Karahan, her earlier career was U.S.-focused. She was a managing director at Goldman Sachs and later joined First Republic Bank, where in 2021 she became co-CEO. Her resignation later that year surprised investors who had expected her to eventually take the reins at the major U.S. lender - which collapsed in 2023.

Erkan has degrees from Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program, Princeton University and Bogazici University.

SAHAP KAVCIOGLU (MARCH 20, 2021-JUNE 9, 2023):

An ex-banker, Kavcioglu's arrival at the central bank in March of 2021 was met with a sharp market sell-off. His previous columns in a pro-government newspaper showed he shared Erdogan's unorthodox view that high rates cause inflation, girding investors for cuts.

As inflation rose that summer he held rates steady for a while but then began easing policy after Erdogan publicly promised lower rates and inflation. His rate cuts led to a historic currency crash in late 2021, which eventually sent inflation soaring above 85% in 2022.

Kavcioglu remained in the post through the tight presidential election in May of 2023, before a re-elected Erdogan re-appointed him to run the country's bank regulator.

NACI AGBAL (NOV 7, 2020-MARCH 20, 2021):

A former finance minister and long-time member of Erdogan's AK Party, Agbal's appointment was followed a day later by the resignation of finance minister Berat Albayrak, Erdogan's son-in-law.

Days before that dramatic weekend in 2020, Agbal had met Erdogan to warn that a policy of FX interventions had left the central bank's reserves vulnerable.

Agbal quickly emerged as a respected inflation hawk and his short stint was dominated by aggressive rate hikes that picked up where his predecessor Murat Uysal had left off, hiking rates to 19% days before he was fired.

MURAT UYSAL (JULY 6, 2019-NOV 7, 2020):

Weeks after becoming governor, Uysal began an aggressive easing cycle, bringing the policy rate to as low as 8.25% in 2020, from 24%. The cuts helped ease financial stresses as the coronavirus pandemic hit but he reversed course and began tightening again in his last few months.

A former private-sector banker and gold trader, Uysal - together with Albayrak - oversaw an unorthodox and risky policy of foreign-exchange interventions in 2019 and 2020 that severely diminished the bank's hard currency reserves.

MURAT CETINKAYA (APRIL 19, 2016-JULY 6, 2019):

Cetinkaya's early months as governor were the last when the inflation rate was within an official target range around 5%.

In 2018 he faced rising price pressures and lira depreciation that led to a full-blown currency crisis, the first in a series that would rock the economy.

Analysts said he was too slow to head off the crisis by raising the policy rate to 24% in September 2018, with the economy tipping into a deep downturn. He nonetheless held policy steady and brought about a sharp fall in annual inflation through most of 2019.

(Reporting by Jonathan Spicer, Daren Butler and Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Susan Fenton)