Already the sky-high interest rates have begun to drop, foreign exchange rates have come down and the stock market has began to recover merely for psychological reasons, without any increase in the volume of the transactions yet. Kemal Dervis makes a healthy impact on the economy Instrumental in this improvement was the assignment of the Deputy World Bank Director Kemal Dervis as the new head of the Turkish economy in accordance with Washington s wishes, if not imposition. Turkish economy will again set out on its journey. While all in the country welcomed the assignment, some uneasy and suspicious outlooks were not lacking either. The first one is that Kemal Dervis is a Turk who has tied his future to the United States, occupying a top position in the World Bank.
Turkey has bitter experiences of such geniuses.
A case in view is Atilla Karaosmanoglu s performance during the second interregnum in Turkey. The first thing he did was to put an end to the ousted PM Suleyman Demirel s drive to give a boost to Turkey s energy investments. He claimed that, with his ambition to go down in history as the king of dams , Demirel was wasting the nation s invaluable savings. The foreigners did attain their ambition to put a spoke in Turkey s development drive with Karaosmanoglu s externally guided mentality, but today the Turkish nation is still paying the price of the current energy shortage three decades after Karaosmanoglu s misguided economic decisions. Then again, the American passport bearer Central Bank governors, Gultekin and Saracoglu, did not at all prove to be useful to the Turkish economy.