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In Turkey, An Autocrat Goes All-In
After years spent living in denial, emerging market watchers finally came around to the reality that Recep Tayyip Erdogan is an incorrigible autocrat.
Market participants accepted that characterization in the geopolitical context, but habitually failed to extrapolate what it meant for domestic economic policy and, by extension, the lira.
Too often, we lament Erdogan's "unorthodox" views in terms that suggest we believe his pursuit of self-evidently dangerous policies is motivated by a steadfas
I don’t have a good sense of the potential spillover from Turkey to other EM and/or DM markets. Is there much, and why?
I wouldn’t say I have any depth of insight, but what I see are historic parallels to 100 years ago when autocrats plunged the world into chaos and global war. Historically (think millennia), Asia Minor and the Black Sea have been military hot spots. I worry that destabilized populations grow extremists that can lead to regional wars as the first domino toward larger scale war.
Putin is currently testing NATO via military build up near Ukrainian in what I believe is a long play to re-establish the Russian empire. I don’t think he’s likely to attack any time soon, but rather is information gathering to understand how NATO would respond for when he does invade Ukraine.
We are in a precarious point in history.
H-Man, put a new captain into a sinking ship and you still have a sinking ship.
They seem like they are on a fast track to Greece like insolvency. But I worry with his penchant for military use that he will try to overcome that insolvency through expansion. If he starts invading his neighbors that will force western action, something we really don’t need right now after just finally getting out of our latest “forever war”.
In addition, pls. keep in mind that “western action” in such a case would be indefinitely more complicated as Turkey is a member of NATO.