Turkey has already spent a third of its foreign exchange reserves in just two weeks to prop up the lira. But whether the IMF bail out is a technical success, as it was in Mexico, or a failure, as it was in East Asia, is not the most important issue. Technical success means international investors will not suffer and the stricken economy will recover more quickly. Technical failure means greater investor loses, extending to taxpayers, contagion effects in other emerging markets, and a much deeper and longer depression in the afflicted economy. But in either case IMF policies are detrimental to the interests of developing economies as they tie them ever more tightly to the torture rack of highly leveraged international wealth management.
Financial crisis are fast breaking stories.
Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit said today that the government would make bolder efforts to insure deposits in the nation's troubled banks and will move to begin privatization of the state-owned telephone company, Turk Telecom, Turkish Airlines and the power and electricity sector by the end of next week. Obviously what managers at the Fund have learned from a year of escalating protests and public concern is to rev neoliberalism up to warp speed. All rights reserved.