The Turkish people are paying theyet another delirium of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who some time ago defined himself as an “enemy of interest rates” and who, now taken hostage by the central bank, has now made the lira a waste paper currency. Waste paper to the point of being banned by Apple.
What does it mean? It means that, after the historic thud of the currency, which plummeted down to -15% against the US dollar the other day, the iPhone giant has decided to suspend sales in Turkey on a temporary basis.
The decision was made by Apple on November 23, the day before yesterday, after the Turkish lira crash: Turkish consumers who tried to buy iPhones and other electronic products, as well as Macs, got an error message going at the giant’s local site.
Suddenly stopped selling most of the products, with the message “Not currently available”, or “not currently available”, based on what reported by Reuters, but also based on direct testimonials posted on social media.
Apple’s online site now works perfectly – but it’s a pity that they can’t be added the products to the cart and make payments.
Erdogan talks about economic independence war, lira crashes down to -15%
The thud of the lira became more dramatic on Tuesday, precisely, when the currency collapsed to 13.45 against the US dollar, falling for the 11th consecutive session, before reducing the thud.
The sell off was fueled by the statements by Erdogan who, the night before, he had defended the rate cut announced last week by the Turkish central bank, calling it part of the “war of economic independence”.
Turkey’s central bank last Thursday cut rates by as much as 100 basis points, to 15%, bringing the total cuts initiated since September to -400 basis points, against inflation now approaching 20%.
In October, Erdogan also fired three members of the central bank’s Monetary Policy Commission.
In March of this year, the purge had instead dropped the head of the central banker Naci Agbal directly, ‘guilty’ of raising rates to try to curb the country’s runaway inflation.
Going back to the events of recent years, there have been several cases in which the Turkish central bank has confirmed itself simple puppet of the government.
There has actually been some attempt by the central banker on duty to claim its independence: as in September 2018, when the CBRT (Turkish central bank) completely ignored Erdogan’s warnings, raising rates of interest instead of lowering them, thus showing a jolt of gasp and dignity and humiliating the president. On that occasion, rates were raised from 17.5% to 24%.
The bank was headed by the governor Murat Cetinkaya, who was later fired in July 2019, for not bowing his head at Ankara’s request to cut rates by 300 basis points, and after raising rates by a whopping 625 basis points to 24% in September 2018.
The trend of the Turkish lira since the beginning of this year remains dramatic to say the least: lhe currency saw 42% of its value go up in smoke and, with a president who has practically taken the place of the central bank, adopting among other things not a restrictive monetary policy, normally used to fight the plague of inflation, but further expansionary, it is more likely to suffer further devaluations than to regain market confidence.
It has lost 22% since the beginning of last week alone.
The awareness of the crisis among the Turks is such that an employee of an Apple store in Istanbul reported that those who want to buy the electronic products of the American giant do so not only for pleasure, but to carry out an investment in an asset that it considers to be of value, how can the iPhone be.
“The economic situation is rather surreal, consumers go in search of reserves of value and catapult into the shops ”.
The currency crisis that hit Turkey also exploded a few days before Black Friday and there are several consumers who fear they will not be able to find the opportunity they dreamed of or / and see the prices of every good soar.