Mubasher: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed to significantly reduce interest rates by the end of this year, Bloomberg reported, citing state-run media.

“We will achieve our year-end interest rate target as well [as] we aim to reduce inflation to one digit by the end of this year,” Erdoğan was quoted by the Anadolu news agency as saying.

 The Turkish president’s remarks came just one week after surprisingly dismissing Murat Cetinkaya, the governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey (CBRT), who kept interest rates unchanged for over nine months.

Erdoğan frequently accused the CBRT of keeping interest rates too high. Last June, he bemoaned that, while the US Federal Reserve was heading to cut the costs of borrowing, Turkey’s 24% policy rate “is unacceptable.”

By 11:10 am GMT, the Turkish lira (TRY) rose against the US dollar, with the USD/TRY pair falling by 0.33% to TRY 5.7022.