Turkish financial crisis

A political dispute in February 2001 between Turkey's president and prime minister over corruption in the banking sector triggered a collapse of confidence, and the government was forced to abandon its crawling-peg exchange rate and let the lira float freely. The currency lost roughly half its value within weeks, several undercapitalized banks failed, and the economy contracted by more than 5% for the year. The crisis brought in economist Kemal Derviş as economy minister, who negotiated a large IMF program and pushed through banking-sector clean-up and central-bank independence reforms. Those reforms are widely credited with enabling the strong, if later uneven, Turkish growth of the 2000s.