In Turkey, the currency is tumbling and the country is sinking deeper into crisis every day. Traders and entrepreneurs, usually quite discreet, are now stepping aside and openly criticizing President Erdogan’s monetary choices.
With our correspondent in Istanbul, Cherry Sudry Le Dû
As he looks at his book of accounts, Can, who runs a farm products business, is in despair. For the past few weeks, it has been impossible to predict your cash flow.
” We have to calculate gasoline, labor, packaging, insurance… These days we do these calculations every morning and every evening. For entrepreneurs who bring in products from abroad, you have to put more and more Turkish lira on the table against the euro or the dollar.
” Before, we adjusted our prices twice a year. Now it’s more like twice a week. Look: last year we sold a kilo of rice for 17 Turkish lira. Today is 34 pounds! it has increased by 100%. “
In everyday life, pictures of supermarkets changing their price tags every week are plentiful on social media. And the video of a farmer throwing away his tomato production, reacting to the pound’s total fall arguing that it was no longer worth anything, shot a lot.
Even members of Tusiad, an association which claims 85% of Turkey’s exporting companies, are fed up with the currency’s instability. They denounce monetary choices that pull the country down.
Even if on Monday evening, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced a whole series of measures aimed at halting the fall of the currency, causing its sudden rebound, many do not believe it. And the instability of the currency makes them more worried than ever.