Less than a year since she assuming office… the governor of the Turkish Central Bank resigned
Turkish Central Bank Governor Hafize Gaye Erkan announced her resignation from the position she held less than a year ago.
Erkan said that a major campaign had recently been organized to assassinate my reputation, and said, “At this stage, our economic program has begun to bear fruit… The increase in our reserves, economic data and headline indicators of inflation are evidence of this success”.
Erkan said, in a statement on X, “Despite all these positive developments, and as is known to the public, a major campaign has recently been organized to assassinate my reputation… In order to prevent my family and my innocent child, who is not even one and a half years old, from being subjected to this process further, I asked the President to relieve me of my duty, which I have been doing with pride since day one”.
Erkan’s resignation came after a media scandal that accused her of granting benefits to her family at the Central Bank.
In his first comment on the news of the resignation, Turkish Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek said that the resignation of Central Bank Governor Erkan was her decision.
Before assuming the position of Turkish Central Bank Governor, Erkan held the positions of co-CEO at First Republic Bank and general manager at Goldman Sachs Bank.
Erkan was the fifth person to assume the presidency of the central bank in about four years, as she came to office after Şahap Kavcıoğlu, who led Erdogan’s campaign to cut interest rates, which launched a historic currency collapse in 2021 and pushed inflation to a 24-year peak when it exceeded 85% last year.
A few days ago, the Turkish Central Bank raised interest rates to 45%, thus ending the tightening cycle it began in an attempt to curb inflation.
The inflation rate reached 65% in December, the highest level since November 2022, and the highest level of inflation recorded by Türkiye in October 2022 was 85.5%.
The Central Bank raised interest rates from 8.5% in February 2023 to 42.5% last December.
Meanwhile, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appointed on Friday, former Amazon economist Fatih Karahan as the new governor of the Central Bank, succeeding Hafize Gaye Erkan.
Fatih Karahan was born in 1982 in Eskişehir and graduated from Boğaziçi University, Departments of Mathematics and Industrial Engineering in 2006.
After earning a master’s degree, he completed a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012.
Karahan started his career as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2012 and served as the Team Leader of Labor and Product Market Studies and also a monetary policy advisor at the Bank until 2022.
He also taught as an adjunct professor at Columbia University and New York University, then, he became a senior economist at Amazon in 2022 and was appointed principal economist there in November 2022.
Karahan, was acting as Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye since 28 July 2023.
