By Muhammed Ali Gurtas
ANKARA (AA) – Turkey’s benchmark index went up by 581.13 points to reach 88,830.21 at the close on Thursday.
The BIST 100 rose 0.66 percent with total trading volume at 5.2 billion Turkish liras ($1.41 billion).
The Turkish lira stood at 3.6890 to the U.S. dollar at 5 p.m. local time (1400GMT), compared with 3.7230 at Wednesday’s closing.
On Thursday, the banking and holding sector indexes rose 1.01 and 0.33 percent respectively. The mining sector performed best — a 8.89 percent rise — while the food beverage index saw the largest drop — 0.46 percent.
The most heavily-traded stocks were in private lender Garanti, state lender Halkbank, national flag carrier Turkish Airlines plus the other lenders, Is Bankasi and Akbank.
Shares of gold mining firm Koza Altin were the day’s best performer with a 14.57 percent rise. Conglomerate Ihlas Holding suffered biggest drop of the day, falling 4.55 percent.
The Borsa Istanbul Gold Exchange index increased by 0.36 percent. Gold was trading at 147,400 liras ($39,954) per kilogram at 4.30 p.m. local time (1330GMT).
Turkey has implemented comprehensive and robust monetary tightening to contain rising inflation, Central Bank Governor Murat Cetinkaya said Thursday.
“We have increased the overnight repo and late liquidity window rates, delivering strong monetary tightening in order to contain the deterioration in the inflation outlook,” Cetinkaya said, according to his comments from a conference in London that was carried on the bank’s website.
“We have also stated that inflation expectations, pricing behavior and other factors affecting inflation will be closely monitored and, if needed, further monetary tightening will be delivered.”
He added: “This is a clear and stable policy tightening which will be preserved until we see a considerable improvement in medium-term inflation dynamics.”
Turkey’s calendar-adjusted industrial production advanced by 1.3 percent in December 2016 compared with the figure from the same month in 2015, the Turkish Statistical Institute said in a statement Wednesday.
