Page 10 - TURKRptOct19

currency market interventions since last November. Additionally, transaction counterparts have disclosed some details of public lenders’ involvement in interventions, feeding speculation.
The unexplained sum seen in the central bank’s net official reserves to date this year declined to $24.7bn at end-August from $29.6bn at end-July, Kerim Rota, a former Turkish banker, said on September 30 in a tweet.
The unexplainable change in the central bank’s reserves matches the unexplainable change in lira funding, Haluk Burumcekci, another former banker and currently an independent analyst, said on October 8 in his daily bulletin.
Lately, the central bank has opened new swap markets and introduced new instruments, making it harder to catch developments.
FX interventions conducted by the central bank noticeably began with the taking of huge short positions in USD forward contracts on the Borsa Istanbul’s derivatives markets following the currency crisis of last August.
“Geopolitical risks will rise once the Syrian operation... commences but until then, run with 'The Dude' this preposterously named, mythical punter who is a huge buyer of Turkish equities today. He's been quiet for a while and his identity remains nebulous but I suspect it is [E]rdogan's private punting pot,” Julian Rimmer of Investec Bank said on October 7 in an emailed note to investors.
There is no certain data available for The Dude’s trading but he was seen on the radar by market players in 2016 after the trading volume of Yatirim Finansman, then a small brokerage in Istanbul, significantly jumped and it started to make the market.
Since then, market players have treated transactions by Yatirim Finansman as transactions by The Dude.
Yatirim Finansman was this year’s largest net buyer on the Borsa Istanbul as of October 2 with TRY3.4bn worth of net purchases, according to a bulletin released on October 3 by Garanti Invest. BGC Partners was the second largest at a relatively limited TRY1.57bn.
2.3 INSIGHT: It’s the Turkey we’ve come to love: Official growth beats expectations!
Turkey’s GDP contracted by a better-than-expected 1.5% y/y in the second quarter following the contractions seen in the previous two quarters, statistical institute TUIK said on September 2.
But, before we go on, note without further ado that TUIK has, while crunching the data, revised all past figures up until 2016 once again, making it nigh on impossible to trace the country’s true economic path. This kind of thing is all too common with Turkey's official data so rather than write "a better-than-expected" as has been written above, perhaps the trained eye would be happier with "an expected unexpected".
The median finding of a Reuters poll released last week forecast that the Q2 GDP contraction would come in at 2%.
Available Q3 data, meanwhile, possibly suggests that Turkey is set to clock up four consecutive year-on-year contractions, with the government eyeing the base effect that will emerge in the last quarter to finally lead the economy into growth territory, as long as it is not hit by a fresh economic shock before then.
10 TURKEY Country Report October 2019 www.intellinews.com