The new head of Turkey’s central bank said excessive inflation has priced her out of Istanbul’s property market, leaving the former finance professional with no alternative but to move back in with her parents.
“We haven’t found a home in Istanbul. It’s terribly expensive. We’ve moved in with my parents,” 44-year-old Hafize Gaye Erkan, who took up her post in June after two decades in the United States, told the Hurriyet newspaper.
Erkan previously worked at firms including Goldman Sachs and First Republic Bank — and is now getting a crash course in the soaring prices that have seen many young people struggling to find lodgings.
“Is it possible that Istanbul has gotten more expensive than Manhattan?” she said.
Year-on-year inflation was 61 percent in November, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan allowed the lira currency to collapse while promising that a new team of Wall Street economists would solve years of economic catastrophe.
To quiet rising resentment, officials have capped rent increases at 25% — though experts say this has merely exacerbated housing tensions, as landlords attempt to evict tenants, often fraudulently, in order to set new and higher rents.
In an effort to keep inflation under control, the central bank raised benchmark lending rates to 40% last month.
“We’re nearing the end of our monetary tightening measures,” Erkan told the paper.