‘Too soon to uncork the champagne’

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

It is too early to pop the champagne and Turkey’s Central Bank Governor Erdem Başçı shouldn’t prepare quite yet to hang a Nobel Award in economics on his mantle piece, said the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
 
Turkey’s mushrooming current-account deficit is set to improve, but remains elevated, around 10 percent of gross domestic product at the end of 2011, Joe Parkinson of the WSJ said a Jan. 30 article. Considered to be the economy’s Achilles’ heel by many investors, it is still largely financed by speculative short-term investments he said.

Meanwhile, the Central Bank’s increasingly complex economic policy is feeding investor fears that the economy, which grew at the pace of 8.2 per cent year on year in the third quarter, could be headed for a hard landing, according to the WSJ. The contagion risk from the crisis in Europe –by far Turkey’s largest export market– remains a clear danger, it said.