Turkey through The World's eyes

Following this morning's post on a view of the world through a Turkey economist's eyes, here comes the exact opposite relationship: Turkey through the world's eyes. But before you go on, have a look at this FT op-ed that argues for an increase in the Bank of England policy rate. Just replace all the "England"s with Turkey and "hold rate" with "cut rate", and this could easily be passed as a piece written on Turkey... Man, I AM really starting to see Turkish monetary policy everywhere...

But coming to the matter at hand, the Central Bank's policy has been getting a lot of attention of late. For example, Reuters recently interviewed Durmus Yilmaz (also covered by the Guardian), and Harvard econ. professor Ken Rogoff, former chief economist of the IMF, recently praised the Central Bank. And Emma Saunders, blogger at FT's moneysupply blog argues that the Central Bank's policies are working, a topic to which I will return to either later today or tomorrow.

As a byproduct of the interest in the Turkish economy and monetary policy, I, as a Turkey economist writing in English, have been in demand of late as well:)- The previous week's column was inspired by freelance journalist Simon Roughneen, who had contacted me for a piece he was writing for the Guardian. And I had a long phone chat with a Dow Jones reporter also doing a piece on Turkey- I am keeping her name for the moment, since I did not get her permission to disclose it, but I'll link to her article once it is published.

The impression I got from all these pieces on Turkey and my own chats with foreign journalists have made me confident in my constructive ambiguity idea I mentioned in my last column: That at least part of the success of the Central Bank's success is because of the confusion it has created in markets. But I am getting too far ahead: That is the topic of the upcoming post I mentioned above.