If the radical economic transformation (RET) faction of the ANC ever needed a real-time lesson in what happens when you play politics with monetary policy, this week’s collapse in the Turkish lira is a handy how-not-to guide. Its new central banker, Sahap Kavcioglu, is an ideological match made in heaven for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who believes, against convention, that high interest rates are the cause of inflation, and not the remedy for it.
It is why Erdogan sacked his former bank chief, the well-regarded Naci Agbal, who had hiked rates to 19% to rein in Turkey’s rampant inflation, now at 16%. The Turkish lira, predictably, slumped 14% on Monday, while Turkey’s stock exchange lost a tenth of its value...
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