TURQUÍA, STANDARD & POOR'S Y LOS CONTRAPESOS

AM | @agumack

"La plenitud del crédito es incompatible con la existencia de un poder sin equilibrio" — Jacques Necker

Standard & Poor's revisa de estable a negativa su evaluación de la deuda soberana de Turquía. La calificación de largo plazo, de BB+ en moneda extranjera y BBB en moneda local, se mantiene sin cambios (*). A la vista de los acontecimientos recientes, la decisión no sorprende. Lo que me llama la atención en el texto de S&P es la referencia a la "erosión no anticipada de los frenos y contrapesos institucionales". ¡Excelente! Es exactamente la visión que intentamos explicar en Contrapesos [ver].

Éste es el texto:

The outlook revision reflects two emerging risks to our ratings on Turkey. First, we believe that Turkey's fiscal and monetary policies have exposed the country to a potential hard landing as external conditions tighten. Inparticular, Turkey's external and fiscal positions could suffer beyond our base-line forecasts published on Nov. 22, 2013, should GDP performance worsen beyond our current expectations. Versus November, we have revised downward our projections for Turkey's GDP, foreign exchange reserves, exchange rate stability, and domestic interest rates and credit conditions.

We have lowered our projection of average GDP in 2014-2015 to 2.2% from 3.4%, and consider that unfavorable exchange and interest rate dynamics would pose further downside risks to these forecasts. Weaker growth would almost certainly lead to poorer fiscal performance (as it did in 2009), and could also put pressure on asset quality in Turkey's financial sector. In light of our criteria, the effect of these revisions has prompted us to reevaluate risks to Turkey's sovereign creditworthiness. Second, Turkey appears to have suffered an unanticipated erosion of institutional checks and balances and governance standards.

For example, we believe that any constraints on the independence and transparency of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey (CBRT) pose a risk to an economy that has traditionally relied on significant external financing needs. At the sametime, we recognize that the Central Bank has recently normalized its interest rate policy by reactivating the one-week repo rate at a level above expected inflation.

La independencia del banco central es definida como elemento-clave de los contrapesos institucionales. Precisamente, intentamos reflejar este hecho en nuestro Índice de Contrapesos [ver]. Ojalá fuera éste el único problema de Turquía — la independencia judicial y la libertad de prensa sufren ataques diarios por parte del ejecutivo. Sé que a muchos de mis amigos economistas no les gusta hablar de contrapesos institucionales, la idea más importante jamás formulada por la ciencia política. Menos todavía les agrada imaginar el vínculo (evidente, sin embargo) entre forma de gobierno y costo del capital.

Yo no puedo convencerlos. Tal vez Standard & Poor's lo logre.

(*) Standard & Poor's: "Outlook on Republic of Turkey Revised to Negative on Risks of a Hard Economic Landing; Ratings Affirmed", 7 de febrero de 2014. Twitter: @standardandpoors.
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