Is Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s monetary policy as mad as it seems?

WHEN INFLATION in your country hovers near 20%, then spikes to 36% in a month, alarm bells should be going off at the central bank. Not so at Turkey’s, where the preferred course of action has been inaction. On January 20th, weeks after the consumer price data was published, the bank’s monetary-policy committee kept the main interest rate unchanged, at 14%. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who increasingly runs the bank like a government agency, has pledged not to raise rates again.