Way past that? No. This is what Trump intended. You should know by now that he uses economic pressure and leverage to induce the behavior he wants. As the article shows, the economic pressure is taking effect. It remains to be seen if that pressure induces Turkey to release the American.
Has nothing to do with that idiot American. This has been in the making long before Trump and Trump and the religious right are just trying to exploit this to get a possible criminal out of Turkey.
Correct. As horrid as this is for the Turkish people, the economic state is of Erdogan's own economic policy making. It's actually quite interesting how often it occurs that despots fail to grasp basic economic knowledge or even follow the advice of their economic policy experts.
Erdogan is obsessed with "growth" and “progress,” which he literally sees as the completion of massive government-backed infrastructure projects. To be fair those project have actually been a significant part of his electoral success, and the Turkish economy’s gone into red-hot GDP growth over drive because of it. We're talking hundreds of billions spent on railroads, bridges, airports, tunnels and even a new national space agency. All of it financed on government debt and speculative future tax revenue cash inflows.
But a couple of issues have developed mid-2017 and into 2018 because of that, which are (1) a decrease in foreign capital investment inflows, (2) an exploding inflation rate due to the GDP growth and the overheated economy, (3) exponentially growing fees to service the government’s debt, (4) Turkey’s credit rating plummeting to junk status due to (2) and(3), and (5) vast market devaluation of the Turkish lira due to all of the previous 1-4 issues.
As a structural issue to add to all of those, the financial news sources tell me that Turkey has always long suffered from low savings rates and excessive corporate/individual borrowing.
Now Erdogan, as Turkey’s new micro-managing all powerful dictator, has done exactly all of the wrong things in response. He’s double-down on the government expenditures. He’s interfered with the Turkish central bank’s policies, refusing to allow them to increase interest rates or pull back the easy money policies … labelling it “treason” and against Islamic values. After this most recent election, Erdogan then fired his Deputy Prime Minister (an economist) in favor of his son-in-law. And as the lira has entered free-fall Erdogan’s trying to ban the after-marketing trading and it will absolutely not surprise me if the government starts to try to manipulate the currency.
Turkey's economy is beginning to crumble, but it yet has a long way to fall if Erdogan and the Turkish government continues to remain in power and demonstrate garbage economic leadership.
