Article: The Fall Of Turkey, The Rise Of Bitcoin

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The Fall Of Turkey, The Rise Of Bitcoin

TYLER DURDEN, 26 April 2021

It never ceases to amaze me how tone deaf those with power are.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in serious trouble for the first time in his political career. He’s a man staring at a massive electoral problem coming this fall.

Erdogan is currently presiding over an economy in complete freefall. With recent reports of food riots over government handouts of potatoes and onions the news only seems to be getting worse there on the eve of national elections.

Turkey is emblematic of what happens to a country systemically mismanaged because of its geopolitical importance. A man like Erdogan is able to maintain power because he’s constantly schmoozing both sides of the Bosporus to get subsidies to fuel his personal ambitions.

This is part of the reason why Turkey has the largest army in NATO while the private economy has the worst foreign capital liabilities position of any major emerging market.

And it looks like Erdogan may have finally overplayed his hand too many times in the last year.

He has made multiple major missteps on the geopolitical stage, attempting to assert Turkey as a regional powerhouse only to be thwarted at every turn by Russia. Be it Libya, Cyprus, Syria, Azerbaijan, or Iraq Putin has outplayed Erdogan at every turn.

With each of these setbacks his gambits become more and more desperate. And he is egged on by the U.S. and the EU to make these gambits as he hides behind the shield of Turkey’s membership in NATO.

Anyone else who wasn’t so strategically important who made this many major geopolitical and military blunders would have already been overthrown. But now it looks like he’s run his full course.

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