Turkish Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek and Central Bank Governor Fatih Karahan will hold a teleconference call with international investors on Tuesday, the Treasury said, after the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor roiled markets, according to Reuters.
Last Wednesday police detained Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main political rival, and a court jailed him on Sunday pending trial on corruption charges, sparking Turkey’s biggest protests in more than a decade.
The Treasury and Finance Ministry confirmed that Tuesday’s investor call would take place at 1300 GMT and would be hosted by Citigroup and Deutsche Bank to “assess the latest developments in the Turkish economy.”
İmamoğlu’s detention sent the lira, stocks and bonds sharply lower and prompted an outcry from the main opposition party, European leaders and hundreds of thousands of protesters, who condemned the actions against him as politicized and undemocratic.
On Monday İstanbul stocks rebounded nearly 3 percent, while the lira held steady against the dollar.
The Borsa Istanbul benchmark index ended last week down 16.6 percent, its worst drop since the global financial crisis in October 2008.
Turkish stocks have underperformed the main global emerging market index by over 20 percent since August.
The index was up 2.45 percent at 0802 GMT, while the banking sub-index stood 2.7 percent higher at 0802 GMT on Tuesday, after last week’s more than 26 percent tumble.
The Treasury, central bank, the BDDK banking watchdog and capital markets board held a series of meetings with market actors over the weekend and announced several steps.
The measures had begun with the central bank raising the upper band of the interest rate corridor by 2 points to 46 percent in an interim meeting last week, pausing funding from the policy rate.
While the central bank took a tightening step of close to 400 basis points, it also sold around $14 billion in foreign exchange. Additionally, it has started liquidity note issuance and TL-settled forward foreign exchange sales transactions.
Also, short selling was banned for one month on the Istanbul stock exchange.