ahap Kavcolu: Recent economic and financial developments in Turkey Speech by Mr ahap Kavcolu, Governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, at the 91st Ordinary Meeting of the General Assembly, Ankara, 28 March 2023. *** Esteemed Shareholders, Distinguished Guests, Before I start my speech, I would like to wish Allah Almighty's mercy on our citizens who lost their lives in the devastating earthquakes in February, I extend my condolences to their grieving families, and I wish a speedy recovery to those who are still being treated. I would like to commemorate again Prof. Yusuf Tuna, our esteemed professor and member of the Monetary Policy Committee, who passed away last year. Before moving on to the agenda items to be discussed at the General Assembly, I would like to share with you our assessments regarding the macroeconomic outlook and our monetary policy implementations. In the last part of my speech, I will summarize our activities in 2022. Distinguished Participants, In 2022, while the negative effects of the pandemic had not yet been fully eliminated, as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian war that took place in Türkiye's immediate region, supply constraints appeared again and particularly energy prices and global commodity and food prices rose rapidly. In addition to the geopolitical uncertainties that emerged due to the war, the supply-demand imbalances that persisted in the aftermath of the pandemic caused inflation to increase rapidly on a global scale, reaching historically high levels.
We used our main policy tool, the one-week repo auction rate, and macroprudential policy tools in line with the Liraization Strategy. Accordingly, we kept the policy rate (the one-week repo auction rate) unchanged at 14% in the January-July 2022 period. On the other hand, we acted in a proactive manner in the face of intensifying risks of a global recession driven by geopolitical developments and global financial conditions. To limit the effects of these risks on domestic supply, investment and current account surplus capacity and to sustain the structural gains in industrial production and employment, we initiated a rate-cut cycle in August. As of November, we had delivered a rate cut of 500 basis points in total, bringing the policy rate down to 9%. With these decisions, we enabled investments that will strengthen Türkiye's position to continue at suitable financing costs at a time when the global economy was facing supply chain and financing problems. In 2022, we also conducted an effective reserve management to reinforce our international reserves. We created a diversity of sources through deposit accounts converted from foreign exchange, YUVAM accounts that we devised for non-resident citizens, FATSI accounts aimed at bringing physical gold into the financial system, and regulations regarding the selling of a portion of export proceeds to the Central Bank. As a result of all these actions, our international reserves rose by 17% from USD 111 billion at end-2021 to USD 128.8 billion at end-2022. Meanwhile, international reserves of central banks decreased by 6% on a global scale in 2022.