On Thursday evening we noted - with more than a little amusement - that Brazil's embattled finance minister had cancelled an appearance at a G20 summit in Turkey in order to address his future in President Dilma Rousseff's government amid a plunging BRL and a horrendous fiscal situation.
Why is that amusing? Because Turkey isn't doing so well itself either politically or economically, and when it comes to plunging currencies well, Ankara is doing its absolute best to make things worse. Here's what we said yesterday:
Last month, Turkey’s central bank had a chance to give the plunging lira some respite by preempting the Fed and hiking rates.
Only they didn’t.
And not only did they not hike, they made it clear that tightening would only occur once the Fed tightened and then made matters immeasurably worse by proceeding to stumble through a "roadmap" of how they planned to deal with DM policy normalization. That, combined with political turmoil, an escalating civil war (and yes, that’s what it is), and pressure on EM in general has led directly to further weakness for TRY.
Don't look now, but the lira just plunged to a (new) record low:
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Put simply: if we don't see aggressive emergency hikes sometime soon, this debacle is going get a whole lot uglier and that means more pass through inflation like we saw in August which in turn will do absolutely nothing to calm nervous traders let alone a nervous populace.
And the punchline (from just minutes ago):
- TURKEY DEPUTY PM CEVDET YILMAZ SPEAKS AT G20 EVENT: BHT
