Now I don’t know why, but a whole lot of people have gotten it in their heads that Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s recent referendum win (which, you’re reminded, essentially made him Sultan) is a positive development for Turkey.
This despite the fact that the consolidation of power in a newly reconstituted (both figuratively and literally) presidency quite clearly marks an epochal shift in Turkish politics and plunges the country even further down the “autocracy” rabbit hole than they’d already gone.
If you need a preview of what’s coming, all you need to do is look at what Erdogan did on Saturday or, more poignantly still, what he did early last week in Sinjar.
But for traders, autocratic rule is apparently better than chaos. There’s probably some truth to that given that nothing says “stability” like “ruthless, calculating dictator,” but you’re encouraged to remember that most autocracies don’t end well. Indeed, a whole lot of them end in failed states.
Ok, so back to the market, which has bid up shares in the MSCI Turkey ETF more than 9% since the referendum. Of course some of that is part and parcel of the risk rally that followed the market-friendly result of the first round of the French elections, and there’s been a flurry of news/action from Turkey’s central bank which helped the lira rise to its highest level against the dollar since January 3 last week, but the bottom line here seems to be that people think Erdogan’s power-grab is a good thing. Witness this rather amusing tweet from Sunday:
https://twitter.com/nosunkcosts/status/858889585979346947
Got all of that? Good.
So in a testament to the market’s autocrat optimism, the London-traded iShares MSCI Turkey UCITS ETF got GBP23.8m,or $30.8m in inflows in week ending April 28.
That would be the biggest inflow since October of 2013!…
Long autocrats or, visually…
