It was February 14, just days after two devastating earthquakes struck Turkey, and Finance Minister Nureddin Nebati was at a meeting to finalize his decision to keep the Istanbul Stock Exchange closed. Then his phone rang: the boss had other plans. Nebati and Turkey’s financial regulators spent the next 24 hours making sure the market reopened — and that Turkish stocks didn’t plummet if it did.
The call came from Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s micromanager. From the cost of borrowing to the way products are sold, the President and his inner circle control almost every aspect of the $900 billion economy. When Erdogan said in November he wanted to see interest rates fall into the single digits, the central bank complied – perhaps not least because he had fired three governors in three years. Once, in 2017, he called for pickles to be wrapped in plastic to reduce waste and lower prices.
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