ISTANBUL—One day after Brazil and Poland raised their key interest rates, Turkey's central bank on Thursday took the opposite tack and cut, underlining the different strategies that emerging market policymakers are taking as they grapple with rapid growth and volatile investment flows.
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The Turkish central bank cut its policy interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to a record low of 6.25%, surprising markets which had expected the bank to sit tight after cutting the rate by half a percentage point last month.
The Turkish lira fell 2.3% to $1.584 after the bank's decision Thursday.
Despite Turkey's near 8% growth forecast for in 2010, the bank has embarked on a complex policy of cutting interest rates—to curb the inflow of speculative investment—while raising reserve requirements for commercial banks to rein in an expanding consumer credit boom.
The Turkish move appeared to be in stark contrast to other emerging markets, which have started raising their key interest rates to head off inflationary pressures, while dampening consumer demand.
The central banks are effectively choosing different ways to tighten monetary policy, analysts say. That's because the scale of the increased reserve requirements that Turkey is implementing—with more expected Friday—mean that overall, Turkey's central bank is actually tightening monetary policy.
"The decisions show monetary policy is tightening in increasingly different ways across the emerging markets," said Neil Shearing, emerging markets economist at Capital Economics in London. "Turkey has been creative while Brazil has been more traditional; it's all a question of managing inflation and inflows of capital."
On Wednesday, Brazil raised its benchmark rate 50 basis points to 11.25%, and said that would likely mark the beginning of a new cycle of monetary tightening. Poland's central bank governor Marek Belka said more cuts would follow his bank's 25 basis point rise to 3.75% on Wednesday.
And in Russia, First Deputy Central Bank Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev on Thursday said he now sees inflation as a higher risk than slowing growth, raising the odds that the Russian central bank will raise interest rates next week, too.
Brazil and Poland are reacting to rising price pressures and inflation rates already above their central bank targets.
Turkey, by contrast, appears to have chosen its mix of apparently conflicting tools because it is less threatened by inflation than it is by an inundation of speculative investment flows that are financing a ballooning current account deficit—a mismatch of imports and exports that has led to the Turkish economy's undoing in the past. Inflation is currently at a record low of 6.4% year-on-year in December.
Low interest rates in major economies such as the U.S., the U.K. and the euro zone have pushed investors to search for higher returns elsewhere in the past year, sending capital flooding into fast-growing emerging markets like Turkey. These money flows tend to pump up asset prices but threaten to dry up quickly due to their short term nature if risk sentiments shift, potentially triggering a crisis in their wake.
Turkey's economy is particularly exposed to these speculative inflows, which finance a rising proportion of its mushrooming current account deficit. That deficit more than tripled in November versus a year ago to a hit a fresh record of $5.9 billion as imports outpaced exports by a factor of ten, according to Turkey's official statistics agency Turkstat.
Turkish policymakers insisted Thursday that "additional measures" would be taken to limit credit expansion, stressing that: "The net effect of the measures which have been taken or are envisaged under the new policy is tightening."
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