Turkish people became the losers as the bankers netted more and more in Turkey’s new economy, said Burhanettin Bulut, a deputy from the CHP (Republican People’s Party) on Monday as he criticized the government’s economic policies.
Bulut said people were trapped in a spiral of debt which constantly increased the profits of banks as 1 million 219 thousand people were blacklisted in the first 9 months of this year because they could not pay their debts to banks.
According to statistics given by Bulut, a total of 819 thousand people could not pay their personal loan debts to banks, and 706 thousand people their credit card debts in the January-September period of 2022, being transferred to executors.
“The people are stuck in debt. The number of those who have been followed up by banks for execution in the last five years, whose debts still continue, was over 4 million 165 thousand at the end of September,” Bulut said.
According to Bulut, the banks were the winners during that period.
“In the same period of last year, banks received 84.8 billion liras of interest from individual loans and credit cards, and 118.5 billion liras throughout the year. Banks received 44.4 billion liras more interest from citizens in the first nine months of this year compared to the same period last year,” Bulut said.
Turkey’s inflation stood at 85.5% as of October, a 24-year high. However, according to ENAG, a group of academics calculating consumer price inflation using similar criteria to TUIK, said that the real inflation climbed to 185.3 percent.
Despite the rampant inflation, Turkey’s central bank lowered the policy rate from 19 percent to 10.5 percent, acting on the orders of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who insists low interest rates lead to lower inflation, an opinion that jars with conventional economic theory that says higher interest rates slow inflation.
Source: Gerçek News
