Bank of England Governor Mark Carney will be skipping a key summit of top central bankers in America this week, sending a potential successor in his stead.
It will leave Mr Carney as the odd one out among his US and European peers, with Federal Reserve boss Janet Yellen and European Central Bank president Mario Draghi both set to attend the prestigious gathering in Wyoming which runs from Thursday to Saturday this week.
A spokesman for the Bank of England said there was "no specific reason" why Mr Carney was missing out on the annual conference, but stopped short of giving details of the governor's diary.
Mr Carney will instead send his deputy governor for monetary policy Ben Broadbent, who has become a frontrunner to succeed the central bank boss when he steps down in June 2019.
"Whenever the governor steps down, Ben Broadbent will be one of the people up for consideration for replacing him", Samuel Tombs, chief UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said.
"That's still a few years away until the governor gives up his post, and so a lot can change."
Mr Broadbent and Mr Carney have been closely aligned on monetary policy in recent years, despite a growing chorus of hawks on the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) pushing to wind down the Bank's asset purchasing programmes and hike interest rates from record lows of 0.25 per cent.
Mr Tombs said Mr Broadbent is likely to be a safe pair of hands at the Jackson Hole summit in Mr Carney's absence.
"Ben Broadbent's views have been very similar to Mark Carney's over the last few years, I don't think they've ever disagreed on interest rate votes or a QE (quantitative easing) decision since Mark Carney arrived at the bank in 2013."
