Turkey’s finance minister Berat Albayrak will on Thursday seek to soothe the markets over the lira’s dramatic fall in the wake of escalating tensions with the United States.
Some 3,000 investors from the United States, Europe and Asia registered to join a conference call with Albayrak at 1300 GMT, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
Albayrak, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law, was appointed last month and faces a tough task in getting the economy in order.
He will be hoping to make a stronger impression than last Friday when he made a long-planned presentation on Turkey’s growth strategy at the very moment the lira was in freefall.
“This is Albayrak’s last chance to prove three things: that he understands what is happening, that he can react accordingly and that he has influence over Erdogan,” a European diplomatic source said on condition of anonymity.
The Turkish currency is being pummeled as a result of a diplomatic standoff with its NATO ally the United States — over the detention by Ankara of an American pastor — which has snowballed into one of the worst crisis in bilateral ties in years.
The lira was being traded at 5.7 against the dollar and 6.5 against euro — after it lost nearly a quarter of its value on Friday and Monday.
The slight rebound comes after the Turkish central bank took a raft of measures to keep financial stability and ensure Turkish banks have sufficient liquidity.
Source: AFP
