Monetary Policy Debates in the Age of Deglobalisation

This article is the second in a series of articles on monetary policy debates in the age when deglobalisation became a buzzword. Here, we begin our discussion of the ongoing economic experiment in Turkey as an example to elaborate on these debates. In the third article, we will turn our attention to the post-2018 Turkish currency crisis phase of the experiment by focusing on macroprudential measures, capital controls and central bank independence, as promised in the first article.

In the first article of this series, Öncü and Öncü (2022) established a link between the imperialist–liberalist hegemonic mode cycles of Karatani (2012) and their globalisation–deglobalisation cycles, and relying on the observations of Rodrik (2022), among others, argued that the ongoing globalisation—the current imperialist phase that started in the early 1990s—had not ended yet. They then demonstrated with examples from the last 20 years how the word deglobalisation had come to dominate the prevailing rhetoric and defined the age of deglobalisation as the age in which deglobalisation became a buzzword.

With this second article of the series, we turn our attention to the “deglobalising” country Turkey where with the ongoing monetary policy experiment that started after the currency crisis of August 2018, almost every citizen is now well-informed about, if not an expert on, monetary policy. We all are hotly debating whether the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey (CBRT) should be independent, whether the macroprudential measures taken by the CBRT and Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BRSA) are appropriate, whether the country needs capital controls to protect the Turkish lira, and the like, irrespective of our occupations.