, Columnist
Interest-Rate Obsession May Doom Turkey's Erdogan
The Turkish prime minister's campaign against high interest rates may hurt him more than scandal.
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It is possible that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be undone not by the corruption probe he is suppressing, but by his fixation on low interest rates.
For several years Erdogan has been pushing the idea that higher interest rates are inherently bad, and indeed -- contrary to conventional economic theory -- cause inflation. His view is that the central bank's job should be to target a real-terms interest rate of zero.