'Gone with the Wind' - Turkey's $7.9 Billion Mystery Money That's Simply Vanished.

'Gone with the Wind' - Turkey's $7.9 Billion Mystery Money That's Simply Vanished. (Bloomberg).

Something bizarre is happening on Turkey’s accounting books, and nobody’s quite sure why.

Turkey attracted $7.9 billion of income from unexplained sources during the first eight months of 2014, compared to an outflow of $90 million during the same period a year ago, according to the central bank data. In the three months that followed, $5.6 billion of that left the country.

“There is no way to predict what is going to happen to these flows in 2015,” Mehmet Besimoglu, chief economist at Oyak Menkul Degerler, said by phone from Istanbul.

Besimoglu has his theories about the source of money and why it leaves. Inflows might be linked to capital flight from Iraq and Syria, where the advance of the Islamic State has pushed more than around 1.5 million people across the border to Turkey. Outflows tend to take place during periods of lira appreciation, he said. Read the full story here.





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