Turkey’s central bank maintained its key rate at 45 percent on Thursday, marking the end of its monetary tightening cycle after eight consecutive months of hikes.
It was the first rate decision delivered by the bank’s newly appointed governor Fatih Karahan, a former economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and US online retail giant Amazon.
The bank said that “the current level of the policy rate will be maintained until there is a significant and sustained decline in the underlying trend of monthly inflation.”
Turkey’s annual inflation rate held stable in January at nearly 65 percent, but month-on-month consumer price increases jumped sharply following a huge minimum wage hike.—AFP
