We are standing in front of La Scala restaurant in Milan, engulfed
in heat and a sense of failure, waiting for the limousines which
will take us to the airport. Our little group includes bankers from
Garanti Securities and Merrill Lynch and three of the four
king-pins of Turkey's financial bureaucracy: treasury
under-secretary Selcuk Demiralp, central bank governor Gazi Ercel
and Istanbul Stock Exchange chairman Osman Birsen. The fourth,
Privatization Administration chairman Ugur Bayar, will join us in
London, which is our next port of call.
We are on a three-day road show covering Frankfurt, Milan and
London - in that order - to convince investors that Turkey has got
serious about putting its house in order.
Turkey has an atrocious record for economic discipline. Britain's
inflation at 0.5% a year, the lowest in Europe, is something the
Turkish economy can manage in three days or at most a week. "You
think you have...
