This is not me speaking;

It's the IMF's daily bulletin of press around the world, which I am simply copy-pasting below without any comment:

Figures released this week show that Turkey's budget deficit increased thirteenfold in the first six months of 2009. Foreign investment fell by half in the first five months of the year. One in four youths are now unemployed. To crown it all, GDP shrank by a record 13.8% in the year to the first quarter, putting Turkey among the economies worst hit by the global recession. The IMF expects the economy to contract by 5.1% this year, after registering average annual growth of 6% in the past six years. When the global financial storm struck in the autumn of 2008, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, boasted that "the crisis has bypassed Turkey". He also claimed that there was no need for his country to renew a standby deal with the IMF that expired in May 2008. He has since been forced to eat his words. "We do not have a full-blown crisis, but everything has got significantly worse," says a Western economist in Istanbul. No wonder Mr. Erdogan has now begun to talk of doing a deal with the IMF after all.
Sent by BlackBerry Internet Service from Turkcell