I have around half a million followers and I follow thousands of people on social media. I follow my friends, colleagues as well as analysts and experts I have never met, either from Turkey or different parts of the world. Most of the people I follow happen to be analysts, enabling me to monitor what is happening in the markets as accurately as possible. Cryptocurrencies, debt securities, commodities and stocks… In their own style, they analyse in detail each movement in the markets.

Foreign capital is preferable to borrowing for a country that does not have enough savings for investment to meet its needs. Obviously, certain requirements must be met to bring in these funds. Unfortunately, the governments of most developing countries tend to misidentify the factors that could attract foreign capital.

In my previous articles, I had mentioned the recent incidents on Suez and Panama Canals, emphasising that the rising interest rates all over the world could remain ineffective against a new wave of inflation arising from logistics costs. In order to support this argument, let’s analyse the current situation in the Suez Canal first.

A single equation is not sufficient to describe an economy. Because an economy has many equations, and every economy has its own dynamics. The knowledge taught to students in "Introduction to Economics" classes has been produced to help them understand economics more easily, where cause and effect relationships are difficult to discern from one another.

At the end of each year, financial institutions release their expectations for the next year. Personally, I tend to embrace the principle of "be patient and wait for things to become clearer” because I think it is not wise to generate ideas about the whole year before the first month of the year ends.

As the world's population ages, it is estimated that the population of individuals aged over 65 years will outnumber those under the age of 5 by the next year. Lifespans are getting longer as elderly people tend to concentrate in coastal areas. On the one hand, we have global warming and the projections that sea level will continue to rise over the next 30 years, and on the other, prospective retirees who want to spend the rest of their lives by the sea or ocean.

Economics and finance are two closely related topics, yet they are not the same. What economists do is to assess the current economic situation in the light of historical facts and accordingly generate future scenarios and solutions to potential problems. They tell you what is possible and what is ideal. They factor political and social developments into the equation, and place their focus on development rather than economic growth alone.

Recently, I met trade, economics and foreign policy experts at the USLA campus, Topkapı University’s Gastronomy Centre, to taste the delicacies of world cuisine. The consensus was that global trade is facing a serious risk, which threatens to cause a major increase in freight shipping rates, and ultimately in inflation.

Market Democracy reinforced by free will is, by nature, the ideal regime. In such a regime, it is natural for people to price or bargain goods or services according to their scarcity or abundance in order to meet their needs. This process or “realm” called the free market does not welcome any sort of government intervention unless it is absolutely necessary.

A reader of mine recently said to me, “Professor, will anything good ever happen? You always talk about risks and troubles!” He was right. But I also thought that I was right too. When I look at the state of things, I honestly can’t see anything positive happening. Although there have not been any good developments lately, we can talk about favourable prospects and potential opportunities.

Humans are capable of getting used to good and bad, though not instantly, but over a reasonable period of time. As circumstances gradually worsen, this capability of ours to adapt becomes stronger, our ‘survival mode’ comes into operation and we don't find the time to complain while we try to survive.

In a presentation I delivered in December last year I listed the top risks for 2023: inflation, recession and their impacts on the world trade supply challenges and supply chain restructuring, conflicts and wars, escalating tensions between the Islamic world and the West, the ever-growing global population, environmental degradation and natural disasters and the constantly increasing debt burden and efforts to replace strong currencies.

This article is meant not only for us but also for our foreign friends who often have difficulty understanding us. I have tried to explain how Turkey could always survive through disasters and misfortunes, and the state of being stuck between the East and the West.

An interesting survey has been carried out by the OECD aimed at discovering the percentage of the "subjective middle class", which is about people's perceptions and judgment about their social class. The reason why the OECD decided to investigate this phenomenon was to reveal both the income distribution and whether individuals actually live according to their income. The survey attempts to find out how many of people who say that they belong to middle-class households are actually not middle-income earners.

"No one knows what will happen in the next minute". This statement often comes as a shock to people who strongly believe in determinism, because they were deeply influenced by mathematics taught in high school. Laplace (1749-1827), known as the father of high school mathematics, pushed scientific determinism over the top with the following proposition: