Turkish central bank stirs concerns with opaque funding tool

Turkey’s central bank has sparked a fresh wave of concern among investors and analysts after saying it is supplying billions of liras to the financial system through an opaque market.

After a heated series of questions from journalists and analysts on Thursday, governor Murat Uysal publicly acknowledged for the first time that the central bank has been using the Istanbul stock exchange to conduct swap operations — taking dollars from Turkish financial companies in exchange for lira — as a means of “providing funding to the banks”.