M2 increased 65% YoY, maybe the should cut public spending to reduce their deficit and stop the money printer instead...
Or better: Close the central bank because politicians abuse it to spend money they don't have.
Or better: Close the central bank because politicians abuse it to spend money they don't have.
The labor participation rate is among the lowest, although increasing. Many of the students and retirees are in employment as the life became harder, also the women who traditionally used to be housewives are getting close to western levels of employment.
The “everyone above 40 is retired” is not exaggerated, it’s due to some populist policies in The 90s but it spilled over once again last year when Erdoğan caved and granted right for retirement after 20 years of working(many people have retired at 38, 18 + 20).
Turkey is in a deep trouble and the central bank won’t be able to do much.
On the other hand, its location is very favorable and the Turkish politicians are masters of milking it. Also, the population is still young and being close to EU and even a candidate state with deeply integrated economy, Turkey has a great potential to actually make this system sustainable.
Also, the country is an engineering powerhouse as you might have noticed with its drones and other weapons and multiple tech Unicorns.
But at the same time its politics have become more and more Islamic as the population becomes more and more secular.
So yeah, overall Turkey is a weird place. Lots of troubles and lots of opportunities and IMHO not easy to explain with western mental models.
However, as a someone who lived in Turkey on and off, I can tell you that the country’s life quality has been deteriorating steadily and quickly for the last 10 years without a break. 90s Eastern Europe vibes.
...does that mean that everyone over 40 gets a government check every month? How much is that payment (relative to say the minimum wage)? Presumably those payments not indexed to inflation? So after a couple of years of 100% real inflation, you'd need to get a job anyway?
They receive a normal pension like everybody. Currently the lowest pension is about at %60 of the minimum wedge but 10 years ago it was well above the minimum wedge. The smallest pension is 10K and the minimum wedge is 17K Turkish lira, which is something like 330USD and 560USD respectively after the latest increase of %50. Many choose to work but its complicated from legal standpoint and some companies forced the retired employees out. As Turkey ages, one can expect that ot will get much worse.
The deal is, You must have been working and paying in the social contributions for 20 years straight and be from the right batch(your first contribution must be before the end of 1999 or something like than - not sure about the exact date), so those who started working 20 years ago are all retired in the sense that they receive pension payment and all the other benefits like free healthcare without keep paying in. It's also a common practice to pay a few contributions even if you are still in school so that you can be in an early batch.
Anyway, the system was ridiculous and unsustainable so the first Erdogan government early in the 2000s changed it, only to allow one last batch to retire last year during the elections.
These people were well organised, had lawyers and NGOs and were fiercely protesting since years. They called themselves something like "Stuck at the age towards retirement". More than 2 million of them, people in their 40s and 50s demanding retirement because "they were promised" when they started working in their 20s.
The next batch, that is people who paid their first contribution after 1999, is set to retire 15 years later. Now they are getting organised too, claiming that its not OK to work 15 years just because paid their first contribution one day later.
Turkey might become the first country with Universal Basic Income since everyone wants to retire at their 40s and they are serious about it.
Source? (Not contesting. Just curious.)
You can also find videos of him explaining his findings in more details and he probably has books on it.
It's also a common theme among the islamist, they keep complaining that significant number of kids in islamic schools are actually not muslim(but theists or agnostic or something of this sort) and demand that "someone should do something".
However the more widespread theme is that lots of people are becoming "spiritual" instead of muslims or straight out atheists. They live secular lives, only say that they believe in Allah.
Here is an example, a very popular Turkish influencer who came out of an imam-hatip school: https://www.instagram.com/lucifermichaelson/
Does he look like an islamist to you? He is pretty much banking on the Andrew Tate and Dan Bilzerian style when drops some verses from the koran every now and then. He will say some verse from some holly text about the beauty of the women when coming out of the pool with few models in it.
It's a very widespread phenomenon these days to be "muslim" in the sense that you don't eat pork and wear a scarf or something and then live completely secular life otherwise. The traditional seculars are mocking this new affluential demographic as "süslüman", which is a word play on "süslü"(fancy, with a lot of ornaments ) and "müslüman" (muslim).
This is a classic Zimbabwe-style money printing disaster. The other cause of inflation - devaluation against the dollar caused by weak trade - doesn't help, but the government money printing is really making it worse.
https://www.euronews.com/2022/11/09/everything-is-overheatin...
(not all inflation is money printing; analysis applies to Turkey here and should not be generalized blindly)
Have you ever asked why Zimbabwe started printing money in the first place?
* https://www.huffpost.com/entry/another-look-at-the-zimba_b_7...
* https://clintballinger.com/2020/04/30/airplane-crashes-arent...
Edit: It's also a little hard to stop spending money when you're dealing with the fallout of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Turkey–Syria_earthquakes
> The confirmed death toll stood at 59,259: 50,783 in Turkey and 8,476 in Syria. It is the deadliest earthquake in what is now present-day Turkey since the 526 Antioch earthquake and the deadliest natural disaster in its modern history.
Wasn't the 2004 tsunami deadlier?
What tsunami hit Turkey in 2004?
from GP, emphasis mine:
> > the deadliest natural disaster in _its_ modern history.
edit: formatting
It's always interesting that people talk about money supply/printing as the cause of inflation, but don't go one step further as to the cause of the 'money printing' as well.
* https://www.pragcap.com/hyperinflation-its-more-than-just-a-...
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799102
* https://www.pragcap.com/understanding-hyperinflation/
Japan has had a constantly expanding M2, and yet its inflation rate has not only been low, but negative on more than one occasion:
As a consequence, the demand for Turkish debt is decreasing because it is getting riskier and riskier. And with this the value of the lira is going down because there is lower and lower genuine demand for the currency. And when the value of the currency goes towards 0, the prices are going towards: infinity.
Why do you think the government is trying to stop dollarization? Nobody wants lira.
Japan is an outlier and I wouldn't cite it as a general example because it is the only example. But there are hundreds of examples of inflation caused by expanding money supply.