Sluggish Credit Growth: A Cause for Concern?
The evolution of Turkey’s banking system in early 2000s was a lesson to be learned for any emerging countries, even for the developed ones. Following the 1994 crisis, Turkish financial system had come to settle in a fuzzy equilibrium with a large nominal stock of carried by a handful of banks in a lucrative “carry trade”, and a large number of lemon banks involved in tunneling bank deposits to shareholders through connected lending. Unsurprisingly, the industry had to...
The Outlook of Foreign Direct Investment
Turkey is running a large current account deficit and is a big borrower from abroad as the deficit roughly accounts for 6% of the country’s total GDP and short-term foreign debt stock hits $130 billion. Under such circumstances foreign capital would suppress the rising concerns around the country’s debt. However, Turkey seems to be less attractive to consistently high foreign direct investments leaving the country less able to deal with the stress on its financial system.
The...
The Role of State in Credit Crunch
Only limited number of voluminous bagfuls of hot air have been spent by various economists about the alleged shortage of liquidity in the Turkish financial system that I have written in the past (see here, here, and here). Rather than repeating myself in a blog post by questioning the availability of cash in Turkish banking universe, this time I better focus on how our state-run banks have been performing and how much risk they are at in term...