Kuroda Struggles With Communication as Japan Rates Rise http://t.co/5lB6G6Tlxc further must-read toru fujioka @kitjuckes #japan
16 minutes ago
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Turkish Gold Exports (and imports)
Since I just had a post about black gold, I thought I should do one about the non-black one as well:) Back at the end of June, I was one of the first who brought up the huge rise in Turkey’s gold exports to Iran. Many journalists and columnists picked up on the story, and [...]
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More on oil prices
Just a short follow-up to my latest post on oil prices: A commenter advised me to look at the term structure of oil prices. The term structure was really important in the past; it hasn’t been of late, but the shift from backwardation to contango did catch the change of direction in oil prices back [...]
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What’s Driving the Rise in Oil Prices?
The price of Brent Crude, the benchmark based on North Sea oil, fell $ 35 between April and June, but increases since then have taken about $ 25 of that back. According to many, reports that Israel will bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities are behind this surge. But do markets believe that this event is now [...]
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Turkish LIBOR (TRLIBOR) Is Safe!
Here’s guest blogger Ali G. (not the rapper, yeah yeah, I have to make this joke every time) again: Libor – London Interbank Offer Rate- is a set of rates for different currencies and maturities that is supposed to be the benchmark for some 800,000,000,000,000 USD (that is USD 800 trillion) worth of transactions according [...]
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Eagle-eyed economist eyes Turkey’s Olympic success
Loyal readers will know that economists love to poke their noses into more mundane matters than monetary policy or the current account, whether it be Crimean-Congo Fever or abortion policy. They also seem undeterred by their failure to predict the global crisis, or even more recently the European football champion. Their latest foray into forecasting [...]
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Severance pay in Turkey: Chains binding capitalists and proletarians
One of the “best” things about Turkish severance pay is that it literally “binds” employers and employees, although not exactly in solidarity. Here’s the intro. to my latest Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) column, on Turkish severance pay reform. You can read the whole thing at the HDN website. For once, I don’t have a long [...]
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Results of the Wordcomplete Contest
I had held a small contest in my Desperate Housewives column from two weeks ago: I asked readers to complete the last sentence of my column and offered a wife-beater! as a prize to my favorite. I was supposed to conclude that right after the column, but things continued getting in the way. I have [...]
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Turkey: All quiet on the (south) western front
It really is all quiet in Marmaris, where I am writing this column. After a stellar start to the season, tourist arrivals dropped off sharply in the second half of July, and most hotels are only one-half to two-thirds full. Here’s the intro. to last week’s latest Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) column, on the latest [...]
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Is Turkey’s Current Account Adjustment Coming to a Halt?
Not if you’d look at the latest trade statistics. After all, at $ 7.2bn June trade deficit came in much lower than expectations of $ 7.9bn. But as they say, the devil is in the details, and the details paint a rather ugly picture. The first thing to note is that the fall in the [...]
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More on desperate housewives of Turkey
Just a small addendum to Monday’s Hurriyet Daily News colum/blog post: First of all, Alyson Neel of Today’s Zaman picked up on the “war of the think tanks” theme as well in an article where she mentioned the contradictions between the TEPAV and BETAM reports. The BETAM number from January 2012 mentioned in the article [...]
