by Spengler
The credulity that the mainstream media display towards Turkey continues to astonish. One reads today in the New York Times of Turkey's "booming economy and a self-confidence expressed by the religiously conservative ruling elite," at a moment when a mass uprising betrays the weakness of the Turkish economy and the bumbling of the ruling elite. As I report in the essay below cross-posted from Asia Times Online, employment in Turkey's formal economy has shrunk by 5% in the past year (equivalent to the worst of the 2008 Great Recession in the US) and Turkish households are cutting spending under the weight of a crushing debt burden. Western reporters who turn up for a few days in Istanbul see a lot of construction activity, to be sure -- that's because Turkey's Islamists are spending like drunken sailors on Islamic vanity projects while the private sector is shrinking. Two things have gone terribly wrong for Tayyip Erdogan. The first is his commitment to the Syrian quagmire, and the second (and ultimately more important) is the collapse of his consumer credit bubble. |