ABSTRACT
Turkish President Erdoğan is a faithful Muslim and strongly objects to getting/paying interest. To reduce the (high) inflation rate, he declared in a speech at Parliament: “As long as I am in office, I will fight interest. The NAS is there.”
The primary purpose of this chapter is to shed light on the nature of this concept and to find out whether there is indeed a NAS with the specific aim of curbing inflation by using the Central Bank’s lending rate.
The secondary purpose is to evaluate the outcome of President Erdoğan’s new approach to the Central Bank’s lending rate and find out, thanks to empirical investigations by other experts, whether Erdoğan’s economic policy was a success story or a failure.
The specific questions we are looking for an answer to are as follows:
Is there a NAS explaining/supporting Erdoğan’s claim that “Interest is the cause; inflation is the result, and suggesting a remedy?
What are the results of this economic policy after one year’s experience, dating from January 2022 to December 2022?
