A political row has blown up in Turkey over a social media campaign by the main opposition party that demands to know what has happened to $128bn of foreign exchange reserves that were held by the central bank.
The answer? The Erdogan administration in 2019 began an unorthodox FX interventions policy to defend the Turkish lira (TRY) in the wake of Turkey’s August 2018 currency crisis. But the policy, while burning up the reserves at an horrendous rate, failed, taking the country to the brink of another currency crisis last autumn, causing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to replace his finance minister—his son-in-law Berat Albayrak—and central bank governor and switch to more orthodox economic strategies.
Not that that is the answer that the party behind the social media offensive, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), got from the president when it blamed Albayrak for what it presented as a fiasco. Erdogan, claiming the use of the reserves helped Turkey to ride out a tough period caused by coronavirus crisis shocks, said the campaign was an attack on him and his family.
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