Here we go again: Japan stock market breaking down. It's earned a nap after 80% rise since Nov 13. Unfortunately it's dragging world down.
18 minutes ago
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Just introducing myself
Hello, This blog is a collection on my ramblings on Economics. I plan to write on current economic issues, recent research (sometimes mine, but more often others’), and issues of interest to economists. As I hail from Turkey, I will focus mainly on the Turkish economy, as evidenced by the blog’s title, but you may [...]
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Jordanian Lessons for a Turkish Economist
Two weeks in Jordan is enough to make you throw two decades of Economics down the drain. At least, part of it. We teach in economics classes that a fixed exchange rate is not a good idea. You make yourself open to speculative attacks and lose monetary policy autonomy. It is argued that corner solutions, [...]
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Turkey: Financial Center Dreaming – II
The government has been dreaming about carving a financial center out of Istanbul ever since economy czar Ali Babacan first disclosed the Istanbul Finance Center, or IFC, strategy and action plan, or SAP, to great fanfare on the eve of the IMF-World Bank meetings in Istanbul.
That press conference was marked by a lack of foreign journalists, hinting that they had taken the idea with a grain of salt. The foreign economists I talked to during the meetings humorously (and politely) mentioned the traffic as the biggest obstacle, and I and Kaan Sarıaydın shared that skepticism in a column at the time.
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Turkey: These Economists Are Crazy!
That’s what Obelix would have said if he were living in our times and I would have had to agree.
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Turkey: The Economic Consequences of Mr. Erdoğan
With less than two months to go before the elections, it is appropriate to review the ruling Justice and Development Party’s, or AKP’s, economic policies, with a special emphasis on their second term in office.
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Turkey: I Expect You to Die, Mr. Bond
That’s what the villain Goldfinger answers 007 when the latter asks, “Do you expect me to talk?” in the Bond movie Goldfinger.
I remembered this famous scene when Turkish bonds rallied strongly after the favorable March inflation release on Monday. My precautionary stance towards bonds stems mainly from my belief that markets seem to have been fooled by the inflation figure, whereas supply and demand dynamics paint a mixed picture for bond prospects.
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A Turkey’s Growing Pains
Data released on the last day of March do a pretty good job of taking a snapshot of the Turkish economy.
First, the economy grew 9.2 percent yearly in the last quarter of 2010, bringing growth for the whole year to 8.9 percent. While this number seems rather impressive at first look, you must remember that what goes down must come up: Just as last year’s figure puts Turkey at the top of the growth league, the 2009 contraction of 4.8 percent was one of the highest among the country’s peers.
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Turkey: The (hi)King’s Speech
If you were to believe the papers and analyst reports, the Central Bank of Turkey’s, or CBT’s, required reserve ratio, or RRR, hikes at last Wednesday’s rate-setting meeting were a complete surprise.
That may as well be the case, but it would reflect markets’ herd behavior more than anything else. For some reason, markets took CBT Governor Durmuş Yılmaz’s March 15 speech to, or rather interview with, the Wall Street Journal as irrefutable evidence that the Bank would stay on hold this month.
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Life, Debt and Death in Turkey
The Turkish Statistical Institute’s grave-faced bureaucrats count everything, know everything.
And not only macro data that regularly find their way into your friendly neighborhood economist’s columns. For example, how many eggs were produced last month? 1.09 billion. How many books were published last year? 34,857. And how many telegraphs were sent abroad in 2008? Just one – and one telegraph was received from abroad.
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A Turkish Woman Scorned
The Turkish Statistical Institute’s 2010 Labor Force Statistics, which were released last Tuesday, paint the well-known, but still dire, picture of female employment.
