Consumer price inflation continues to be an issue on the minds of everyone in Turkey and a serious burden on the shoulders of the people; last December, inflation was 36 percent. However, the Erdogan government's financial policy on this issue (long-term low key interest rate) is not only the procedure to contain or delay the crisis, but even more a deliberate strategy of the ruling clique in the country to enrich themselves even more.
For if the Turkish lira is devalued, the superiority of a strong currency like the US dollar over it increases even more. This makes those who own this currency on deposit abroad, i.e. who are not exposed to the inflation of the lira, and who can use it to conduct large-scale trade from Turkey, the beneficiaries of the situation. "Those who have US dollars are benefiting from the crisis, while everyone else is constantly facing new lows," is how an Istanbul gastronomer describes the situation. Yet in 1949, Chairman Mao stated:
The reactionary Nanking Kuomintang government deprives the people of all their freedoms and rights; it oppresses all the democratic parties and the people's organizations, denying them their legal status; it suppresses the righteous movement of the students against civil war, hunger and persecution and against U.S. interference in China's internal affairs and U.S. fostering of the forces of aggression in Japan; it floods the country with the bogus national currency and the bogus gold yuan notes, thus ruining the economic life of the people and reducing the broad masses to bankruptcy; and by various means of expropriation it concentrates the greatest part of the nation's wealth in the hands of the bureaucrat-capitalists headed by the four big families of Chiang, Soong, Kung and Chen.1
So it is the bureaucratic big bourgeoisie that profits from inflation and therefore generally condones and drives the fall of the lira. For those who are at the head of the bureaucrat-capitalist group in Turkey today all have their wealth stored abroad somehow, that is certain. Turkey's richest man, Murat Ülker, educated at the "American Institute of Baking" and the Central College of the German Confectionery Industry and trained at the American Continental Baking Company, whose national "Yıldız Holding" is linked to the financial capital of imperialist food producers like Cargill, Gumlink and Kellogg's2 made big, and whose most important company, Pladis, has its headquarters in London, was able to increase its fortune by a more than 70 per cent between 2019, i.e. before the crisis began, and 2021, to 6.3 billion US dollars, whereas it had decreased from 2015 to 2019.
Confectionery giant with $6.3 billion on his books: Murat Ülker
The ruling clique, through inflation at home, with their financial assets in a stable, "hard" currency abroad, can buy commodities for devalued money with a low exchange rate and export their commodities abroad for hard currency3; making additional profits as they have the means to buy the commodities whose price change has been less than that of general inflation and exchange rate. However, the masses, who are suffering more and more every day from the rising prices, are resisting against the misery and are demonstrating more and more their will and determination to fight against their exploitation.
