The Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye held its policy rate at 37% on Thursday 10 September, where it has stood since 23 July, and named elevated energy prices amid geopolitical developments as an upward risk to inflation1.
It named neither Iran nor any sanctions action. Central banks rarely do, because a rate-setting committee that attributes its decision to a named conflict has committed itself to a forecast about that conflict, and it would then have to explain every revision. The euphemism is doing real work all the same: Türkiye imports almost all of its oil and gas, and the energy prices its statement points at are the ones this war is setting.
OFAC designated three Turkish institutions on 4 September, putting the war inside Türkiye's own financial system days before the committee met. Türkiye had been on an easing path, and this decision defers the relief that borrowers and the treasury were pricing in. The transmission runs through the current account: a higher import bill for crude widens the external deficit, weakens the lira, and feeds back into domestic prices through everything Türkiye buys abroad. Cutting into that would compound the pressure the committee has just flagged.
So the war reaches an economy with no combatant role and considerable exposure, through the price of a cargo rather than through any decision made in Ankara.
