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Comment by runsWphotons | Hacker News Reader

Other people are saying his voters are more likely to split towards Erdogan. Which is it?

All I know is that the bond market thinks it’s a positive sign, and foreign investors aren’t rooting for Erdogan:

”Investors reacted positively to both the new polls and İnce’s withdrawal from the race, pushing the price of Turkey’s international bonds higher. A US dollar-denominated bond maturing in 2030 was trading on Thursday with a yield of 8.54 per cent, down from about 9.2 per cent at the start of the week.

”Bond yields fall when prices rise. The cost of protecting against a default on Turkish debt also declined, with the spread on five-year credit default swaps falling to 490 basis points from above 550 bps earlier this month, according to Bloomberg data. The spread had risen as high as almost 900 bps last summer.”

(Financial Times)

What should be our takeaway from the fact that foreign capitalists don’t like Erdoğan?

Someone can be a totally awful authoritarian bad leader and be hated by (presumably also totally awful) foreign capitalists. That's a thing.

It’s not like or dislike, they’re betting on the economic future of Türkiye - and their bet, with their money on the line, is that Erdoğan is bad for Türkiye.

I'd say they're betting on their possibility to extract wealth from Turkey, and their bet, with their money on the line, is that Erdogan is bad for their possibility to extract wealth from Turkye.

We are not talking about imperialist sources trying to colonize a nation. Capitalism has its shortcomings, which can surely be discussed, but it isn't an evil plan to reallocate the most resources from a zero-sum game to the "foreign capitalists".

Of course not. We are talking about possibility to have businesses who will mostly employ local workers and mostly use local resources, some will maybe even pay fair local taxes, but whose majority of profits will move out of the country. Thus, wealth extraction.

This is not extraction. If they pay wages, this is profit sharing. At best you can argue that they should share more with locals.

Nope. Profit is what remains after wages and any other expenses, and is shared between owners or shareholders.

When they bet on bonds, they essentially bet on the government not to default. When they bet against bonds, they expect a sovereign default, which would be terrible for everyone involved.

Yeah but you’d be wrong. The “foreign capitalists” are betting on Turkiye but mostly betting against other “foreign capitalists”.

That it's irrelevant? What matters is why they don't like him (obviously you can agree on specific things with people you otherwise heavily dislike), and in this case it's because he's pursuing an economic policy that hurts pretty much everyone, domestic citizens and foreign investors alike. Foreign capitalists and foreign left-wingers both dislike Erdogan and dislike eachother - trying to gain meaningful takeaways from who specifically does and doesn't like someone else is probably not wildly helpful

Only if you assume that the capitalists are being honest about why they don’t dislike him.

I mean, the reason is that they want to make money, that doesn't seem particularly out of character. It just so happens that the inflationary policies that are making it hard for them to make money are also making it hard for everyday folk domestically. If that wasn't the case then there wouldn't be that alignment between normally opposed groups.

The likeliest answer is that it's too hard to tell - it's too small of a populace (1-2% or less likely) that's hard to reach in an unbiased way to sample properly for a poll (without it getting expensive, I guess). People are mostly speculating based on his attitudes and positions.

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