Turkey’s AK Party Brings Back Its Economy Guru
How much can one man mean to an economy? Investors in Turkish equities value Ali Babacan at more than 1 per cent of the nation’s stock market, if moves on 18 September are anything to go by. That’s how much the all-share index jumped in the last hour of trading on that day after the former treasury minister was a surprise inclusion in a list of ruling AK Party candidates for November’s repeat election. Nomura strategist Tim Ash has another measure of his value: half a percentage point in treasury borrowing costs. “To my mind, Babacan was Mr. 50 bps,” Ash wrote a month earlier, when it seemed that term limits and internal politics might keep Babacan, who didn’t stand in June’s inconclusive poll, from a role in any future administration.
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