SocGen, via analyst Benoit Anne, had an almost immediate response to the Turkish central bank’s shock and awe action. Here it is:
Hats Off To The CBRT
The CBRT did not disappoint tonight. The CBRT just announced a massive 425bp rate hike. Governor Basci, you have avoided a domino crisis in EM. The policy response to severe financial stability risks was punchy, aggressive and credible. An amazing job overall. The CBRT is now back in the game after going through a few tough weeks during which its credibility was heavily challenged by emerging market investors. Is Turkey out of the woods? Not quite of course. There are still two major issues. On the domestic side, the political environment continues to be quite challenging, with little sign this will improve anytime soon. Meanwhile, the global backdrop remains quite challenging for GEM at this point, and we are still very much in the middle of our Doom phase. So while the CBRT has done a great job at containing financial stability risks, there is going to be more work to do. In any case, I definitely feel much better about the TRY, at least on a tactical basis. Hence we just entered a long TRY/ZAR targeting a tactical move to 5.10. The TRY crisis is over.
So… a 3% drop in the S&P from all time highs, a $10 billion taper, and the world was on the verge of an EM “domino crisis” – is this your centrally-planned stability? Of course, tomorrow the Fed will taper another $10 billion: do we repeat the entire exercise from square one then?
As for the “TRY crisis being over” let’s wait to see what the “popular” response is to this epic rate hike first thing tomorrow when Turkey awakes, shall we, and let’s revisit the TRY crisis in 2-3 weeks when the country’s housing market crumbles, when the economy grinds to a halt and the political crisis goes from worse to worse-est.
