Turkey: melting Ottoman gold

April 12, 2011 12:17 pm by Delphine Strauss

Turkish women look at gold earringsEvery evening, Ahmet Akamak or one of his extended family boards a flight to Istanbul, keeping a careful grip on a bag loaded with solid gold.

The former banker runs a network of shops in Turkey’s south-eastern city of Diyarbakir, buying second-hand jewellery from people in need of ready cash, and selling it as scrap to the dealers clustered in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. His trade has boomed in recent years, as high gold prices turned Turkey – the world’s fourth biggest market for gold jewellery – into a net exporter of the metal.

“We need at least 2 kg a day to be worth the journey. A couple of months ago, we were taking 20kg every day,” Akamak says, as a man enters the shop to sell a worn gold ring for 298TL ($198).

For each kilo of gold, he makes around 300TL. Oguzhan Aloglu, vice president of the Istanbul Gold Exchange (IAB), says: “High prices have affected the physical and jewellery sector. Turkey used to be only a gold-importing country. Now, because of high prices, Turkey is a big supplier of scrap.”

The value of scrap exports to Switzerland – the global centre for smelting gold – reached $4.5bn in 2008, rose to $5bn in 2009 as Turkey’s economy suffered a deep recession, before easing to $2.5bn in 2010, Aloglu says.

At the same time, demand for new jewellery has fallen, hitting trading volumes on the IAB, which slumped from 337 tonnes in 2008 to 115 tonnes last year. Alaoglu says consumers are starting to buy 14 carat gold, because high prices make the traditional 24 carat unaffordable. Yet he estimates that people in Turkey still own some 5,000 tonnes of gold – some of it dating back as far as Ottoman times.

Gold’s popularity – as an investment and as a traditional gift at weddings or births – is understandable, given Turkey’s history of bank collapses and hyperinflation. Owning property is more common than owning shares – seen as the preserve of speculators. Even after nearly a decade of stability, with Turkey’s banks emerging unscathed from the global crisis, customers tend to opt for deposit accounts with short maturities.

This is a problem for policymakers struggling to boost Turkey’s chronically low savings rate and reliance on external capital to finance growth.

Several banks, in particular Turkey’s Islamic-style participation banks, have begun offering gold deposit accounts, exchange traded funds and even gold-dispensing cashpoints in an attempt to bring under-the-mattress savings into the financial system.

Yet the gold dealers are still at the centre of financial dealings in many rural and traditional areas. Akamak says people also come to him and his colleagues to borrow cash – bought with credit cards so they can repay the debt at better rates than they used to pay money lenders. Even when he worked in Diyarbakir’s banks, he says, many customers simply rented safe deposit boxes in which to leave their gold.

“This place is well protected – we have security, guns,” he says of his own shop. The couriers have a special ID for flying to Istanbul, and are met at the airport. Even so, “we’ve been robbed many times,” he admits. “Recently, my brother was seeing a girl in Istanbul. Sometimes she carried the gold for us. One night, she collected it and ran.”

via Turkey: melting Ottoman gold | beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times – FT.com.