Chris Miller

After his party faced stinging defeats in mayoral elections in Ankara and Istanbul last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised a “strong economic program” to turn around his country’s sinking economy. He’s right that Turkey has serious economic problems. Unemployment is rising, and inflation is at nearly 20 percent, the highest level in well over a decade. But Erdogan faces a painful dilemma: The steps his government could take to improve the economy in the medium term would cause short-term suffering. And that is an unattractive prospect as he considers whether to announce a rerun of the Istanbul mayoral election in the hopes that his party might win a new vote. He’d much rather boost growth now, but the methods he’d use to do that will only exacerbate the country’s longer-term problems.

Turkey’s core problem is that the government keeps trying to stimulate the economy even as higher inflation suggests it should be doing the opposite. There is an obvious political logic behind the stimulus. Erdogan has faced a series of big votes in recent years, including a constitutional referendum in 2017, a presidential election in 2018, and this year’s regional elections. Since Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party made its reputation on delivering rapid economic growth, it had to keep stepping on the gas to halt the economy’s slide through each subsequent vote.

The strategy has worked, but with a cost. Thanks in part to these stimulus programs, Erdogan keeps winning elections—with much assistance, of course, from suppression of the opposition and ironclad control over the media. Yet each successive attempt to meddle with the economy has pushed inflation ever higher, from just above the central bank’s target of 5 percent for much of the past decade to 10 percent in 2017 and 20 percent today. As inflation has increased, the value of the lira has declined accordingly. Ten years ago, a dollar bought slightly under 2 liras. Today, with the lira again in a downward swoon, the exchange rate is closer to 6 liras per dollar.

 Compared to a decade ago, it takes roughly three times as many liras to buy a dollar’s worth of goods from abroad. And Turkey is a relatively trade-dependent economy, so the decline in the exchange rate hurts.

Turkey’s government is doing little to stop that slide. True, it has hiked its main interest rate from 8 percent a year ago to 24 percent today. That may sound high, but it is only barely above the inflation rate and is substantially below where it would need to be to stabilize the lira.

Why not increase interest rates further? For one, Erdogan himself has repeatedly arguedthat lira volatility is a “U.S.-led operation by the West to corner Turkey” and that “the inflation rate will drop as we lower interest rates.” The reality, nearly every economist agrees, is the opposite. But set aside Erdogan’s unorthodox musings on exchange rates, and he there is still a political logic for keeping interest rates relatively low.

The reason is that higher interest rates will reduce inflation by reducing economic growth. If the central bank increases the cost of borrowing liras, it would put immense pressure on Turkey’s banks. The banks fund themselves in part by borrowing billions of liras, in part from the central bank. They have to roll over a substantial portion of that debt on a weekly or monthly basis. (Details are in the Turkish central bank’s biannual Financial Stability Report.) When interest rates rise, it becomes more expensive for banks to fund themselves.

At the same time, almost all the loans Turkey’s banks hand out themselves—providing money for Turks to buy houses or cars, for example—are of longer duration and with fixed interest rates. Every time the central bank hikes interest rates, it thus raises the banks’ costs without increasing their revenue.

The result is a credit crunch. As banks cut back lending, consumers buy less, businesses invest less, and the economy slows—the exact opposite of what Erdogan needs to maintain political support. Thus the Turkish government has pressured the central bank to keep interest rates lower than they should be, even at the cost of letting inflation sail away while the lira sinks yet further.

Source; Foreign Policy