The Two-Day Trick Masking Turkey's Short-Term Debt Habit
- Turkish lenders struggling to extend their debt maturities
- Most `long-term' loans only couple of days longer than a year
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Turkey’s central bank has spent 2015 forcing lenders to curb their addiction to short-term debt. On paper, it worked.
The improvement was praised by everyone from Fitch Ratings to the finance minister. But dig a little deeper and the results look less convincing. While central bank data show the amount of foreign debt due in less than a year has dropped for the first time since the global credit crisis in 2009, the banks’ own filings reveal most new loans only count as long-term debt by a margin of a couple of days.