The new head of Turkey’s central bank said she was kept out of Istanbul’s real estate market due to rampant inflation, leaving the former financial director no choice but to return to live with her parents.
“We couldn’t find a house in Istanbul. It’s too expensive. We moved in with my parents,” Hafezi Gay Erkan, 44, who took up her position in June after two decades in the United States, told Hurriyet newspaper.
Erkan has previously worked at companies including Goldman Sachs and First Republic Bank – and is now taking a crash course in the high prices that have left many young people struggling to find housing.
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“Is it possible that Istanbul is more expensive than Manhattan?” She said.
The year-on-year inflation rate reached 61 percent in November, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan allowed the lira to weaken while promising that a new team of experienced Wall Street economists would address years of economic crisis.
In order to calm growing anger, officials also capped rent increases at 25% — though experts say that only exacerbated housing-related tensions, as landlords try to evict residents, sometimes fraudulently, in order to set new, higher rents. .
Last month, the central bank raised its benchmark lending interest rates to 40 percent in an effort to control inflation.
“We are approaching the end of our monetary tightening measures,” Erkan told the newspaper.
France Press agency