111–120 of 207 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Erdoğan is a Ottoman and not an Islamic leader. He is using Islam to reach his goals but he is not married to it. He'll move away from Islam as soon as it no longer serves his purposes.
What is an "Ottoman leader"?
> The one thing that the central bank is not doing is raising interest rates. This is at the heart of the entire crisis. Okay am I missing something here? Europe has negative rates. The US has negative rates. But when Turkey lowers rates from 19% (!!?!!) to 14% it creates a “crisis”?
US does not have negative rates. Every other central bank would raise interest rates with inflation at the levels we’re seeing in turkey. They problem here is that Turkey is doing the opposite
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Erdoğan is a Ottoman and not an Islamic leader. He is using Islam to reach his goals but he is not married to it. He'll move away from Islam as soon as it no longer serves his purposes.
But will the country. Like other populists found out, once you unleash the beast you have a job on taming it again
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Independent is very different from second order. And, yes I know interest on loans increased substantially but that has nothing to do with the new saving product and everything to do with the meltdown in the lira that preceded. Edit: And in any case why would banks raise loan rates if they don't have to bear the cost of the new product?
You are asking the correct question, it does not matter if the cost is financed by banks or public. The cost of borrowing increased substantially, even though exchange rate decreased in the last one week. Access to TL got harder by the actions of the government. This is why interest rates increased.
And all this mind you only IF people move a substantial amount of their lira deposits to the new product AND the lira depreciates more than the rate on the underlying lira deposit account (only then are savers eligible for the kicker rate).
So far, savers have moved around 10b liras into this product, out of a total 4.3 trillion lira of deposits.
You're telling me banks raised rates because of that marginal shift? And even though, I repeat, they don't have to pay for it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everybody knows the new savings scheme he introduced is essentially increasing interest rates. This is not true. Raising interest rates would mean raising the cost of funding for the banking system. Under the new saving scheme, since the Treasury pays depositors the extra yield, the cost for banks remains unchanged. As does the marginal cost of borrowing from the central bank. The new saving scheme is a free dollar…
> printing money Something it cannot do without increasing its own borrowing costs, and reducing the import purchasing power of its currency. This has been tried and doesn't work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday
I'm not very familiar with the mechanics of forex markets, but I'm fairly certain that a small circle of well-connected people has made a killing out of this. Which raises a question...
To what extent was plain and simple greed part of the motive for setting up this unorthodox policy? Insider trading.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> US ... was desperately trying to raise inflation. Well good news, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams....
Right, but at least they said they know there is a problem and they will address it. It is not like how it is in Turkey where they said “inflation is high, let’s decrease it by printing far far more money and decreasing interest rate further”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Islam was acceptable (as Turkey was attempting to be a "free" republic), but not compulsory. Until Erdogan overturned it, there was a ban on women wearing hijab (the head covering , that the vast majority of Muslims consider a basic tenet of their religion) in universities in Turkey. I leave the judgment to you, but personally I wouldn't consider asking millions of people to choose between adhering to their religio…
I would feel extremely comfortable banning those head coverings from all universities, if not all public venues. Religious vestment simply has no place outside of ritual occasions. But then again, I'm from the country Atatürk took after. From our point of view, allowing religion to exist is treating it with tolerance. Acknowledging religion as something that deserves any sort of deference by the State isn't acceptabl…
If saying "either stop adhering to your religion or you cannot go to university/exist in public" is tolerance, what is intolerance? Is everything short of prison, internment camps, torture, and execution tolerance in your point of view?
Also, if a government tells religious people "we are going to make your life very difficult, but you should really be thankful to us that we are not outright destroying you", they should not be surprised when they don't end up being thankful and instead vote for the other guy. That's one of the reasons Erdogan is now in power.
> The one thing that the central bank is not doing is raising interest rates. This is at the heart of the entire crisis. Okay am I missing something here? Europe has negative rates. The US has negative rates. But when Turkey lowers rates from 19% (!!?!!) to 14% it creates a “crisis”?
US does not have negative rates. Every other central bank would raise interest rates with inflation at the levels we’re seeing in turkey. They problem here is that Turkey is doing the opposite
Azerbaijan v. Georgia? To heal? Tooze is good but needs to hire an amanuensis.