Turkey's Central bank Cuts Rates Again
Business
Ankara - Saeed Abdulrazek
Turkey’s central bank has once again cut interest rates by 100 basis points, while the Treasury borrowed $1.6 billion from domestic markets. Despite the measures, the lira hit its weakest level since August 2018 - at the peak of Turkey’s currency crisis - touching 6.999 to the dollar, or around 0.25 percent weaker on the day. Marking its eighth straight rate cut, Turkey's central bank lowered its benchmark one-week repo rate from 9.75 percent, extending an aggressive easing cycle that has seen it fall 1,525 basis points in less than a year. The aggressive easing policy began in July, when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fired the bank’s former governor for not following instructions, stoking concerns about monetary independence. Meanwhile, the Treasury and Finance Ministry announced that three-year CPI-indexed government bonds were sold in an auction. The government bonds will be settled on Wednesday and mature on May 3, 2023. The total tender amounted to 26.2 billion Turkish liras ($3.7 million) with a 42.7 percent accepted/tendered rate. The Treasury said the term rate of 1,106-day government bonds was accepted at 0.99 percent, while the annual simple and compound interest rates were both 1.99 percent. In other economic news, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) said that consumer confidence in the country's economy has fallen 5.8 percent this month amid coronavirus concerns. The index came in at 54.9 month-on-month in April, TurkStat data showed. Last month, the figure was 58.2. The general economic situation expectation index was 74.8, down from 75.6 in March, a 1.1 percent drop on a monthly basis. TurkStat predicted that the number of people unemployed expectation index for a one- year period also dropped 6.7 percent to 53.8 in April.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://aawsat.com/english/home/article/2248126/turkeys-central-bank-cuts-rates-again
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