Turkish crisis in the spotlight – IV
Date:12Sep2018
We are more than a little behind on this one, as these articles should have been posted up earlier (though some have already been done so in our Turkey in the Foreign Press section ), but we thought it would be useful nevertheless to go ahead with another installment of our “Turkish crisis in the spotlight” series — basically a compilation of articles that we come across in the foreign media. (For earlier installments, start from here).
There have been several articles lately on the political nature of the turmoil — Ann Krueger addresses the Turkey-US dimension, saying that Trump made a blunder by distorting the way this crisis is perceived by Turks, while this Bruegel blog asks what the EU should and can do, given Turkey’s importance. In this Brookings blog, Prof. Kemal Kirisci argues that notwithstanding the bellicose rhetoric, Turkey needs the West.
Speaking about the West, the EU and the US, Turkey’s (Treasury and) Finance Minister Mr. Albayrak retorts that “America can’t be trusted to run the global economy”…
Prof. Daron Acemoglu and Joschka Fischer sound pretty glum — opining that things are unlikely to improve any time soon. Acemoglu says that Turkey could look to a period when things were done right and should thus try to replicate that, but adds several caveats as to why this may not be so feasible now, while Fischer advices that, given Turkey’s strategic importance to Europe, “[f]or the sake of both European stability and Turkish democracy, the EU must confront Turkey’s crisis with patience and pragmatism, based on its own democratic principles.”
On the more technical, economics side of things, Leyla Boulton, FT’s Turkey correspondent during the 2001 crisis, wrote a ‘now versus then’ column in the FT, identifying indebtedness and the patriotic context as the two key differences at present. Parenthetically, in another FT article that sums up the weaknesses and strengths of a number of large EMs — which comes as a a handy resource amid much talk of another EM crisis possibly being in the making — Turkey is identified to have ‘one’ (familiar) strength (i.e. fiscal metrics) against ‘six’ (also familiar) weaknesses (ranging from politics to high debt)…
Meanwhile, several articles — here, here, and here — have been popping up lately, focusing on the unravelling of Turkey’s construction boom… More broadly, this latest Bloomberg article talks about how corporates are stuck between two devils — high rates and an unstable lira.
Finally, this Wikipedia page on “Turkish currency and debt crisis, 2018” has been expanding fast. It looks like the page is being updated reasonably frequently as well…
To be continued…