ONLINE
\nAnkara
\nPresident Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that Turks should keep all their savings in lira and that recent exchange rate volatility was largely under control after the lira weakened sharply in the last two months.
\n\u201cI want all my citizens to keep their savings in our own money, to run all their business with our own money, and I recommend this,\u201d Erdogan said in a speech in Istanbul.
\n\u201cLet\u2019s not forget this: as long as we don\u2019t take our own money as a benchmark, we are doomed to sink. The Turkish Lira, our money, that is what we will go forward with. Not with this foreign currency, that foreign currency.\u201d
\nAddressing a business group, Erdogan also called on Turks to bring their gold savings into the banking system and reiterated his unorthodox view that interest rates were the cause of inflation.
\n\u201cFor some time, we have been waging the battle of saving the Turkish economy from the cycle of high interest rates and high inflation, and taking it on the path of growth through investment, employment, production, exports and current account surplus,\u201d the president said.
\n\u201cInterest rates down, interest rates up. My friends, let us please take this out of our books. Interest rates make the rich richer and the poor poorer.\u201d
\nTurks\u2019 earnings have eroded in recent months due to a crash in the lira, though it rebounded from an all-time low of 18.4 versus the dollar last week after the introduction of a state scheme to protect local deposits from depreciation losses versus hard currencies.
\nThe currency TRYTOM=D3 was at 13.295 at 0943 GMT, still down more than 40% this year, by far the worst performer in emerging markets.
\nThe lira crisis was triggered by the central bank\u2019s aggressive interest rate cuts, amounting to 500 basis points since September, carried out under pressure from Erdogan as part of a bid to boost credit and exports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ONLINE Ankara President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that Turks should keep all their savings in lira and that recent exchange rate volatility was largely under control after the lira weakened sharply in the last two months. \u201cI want all my citizens to keep their savings in our own money, to run all their business […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-236292","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n