Hafize Gaye Erkan had breakfast at Tiffany’s, with the other managers of the famous jewelry store, until its purchase by Louis Vuitton. But she has broken glass ceilings -and even diamond ones- that are much more resistant. This month, Recep Tayyip Erdogan – in whose government there is only one minister, Family – has appointed her president of the Bank of Turkey. Some ironize that it is, in this case, a “glass cliff”. The one in which a woman is mischievously placed in front -or rather, on the edge- because it is a lost cause.
However, Erkan, who is 43 years old today but who reached unprecedented levels of responsibility in American banking while still in his thirties – and ultimately a foreigner – has also shown good reflexes when it comes to jumping from runaway trains. The penultimate entry on her dazzling resume is cast in the shadow of the bank she co-chaired for years, First Republic, which had to be bailed out a year after she left.
The San Francisco bank, focused on wealthy clients, is now owned by JP Morgan Chase, after filing the second largest bankruptcy in US history.
Erkan, who was a gifted -and German-speaking- student in Istanbul, will now have other challenges in Ankara for her. First, combat runaway inflation and slow the depreciation of the lira, which has lost 20% of its value against the euro since the May 28 elections. And secondly, restore investor confidence.
His very appointment, as well as that of his main supporter – the new Finance Minister, Mehmet Simsek – already implies a message of rectification for the markets. But Hafize Gaye Erkan will find himself with an issuing bank that has burned its foreign currency reserves to prop up the lira, pressured downward by interest rates (8.5%) five times below official inflation, which is close to 40 %.
No one doubts that the Erkan-Simsek tandem – Turks with American and British passports, respectively – will undertake a progressive rise in rates, despite the misgivings of the Islamo-democrat Erdogan, who, in line with religious tradition, identifies high interest rates with the usury.
The banker Erkan does not share that approach, but she owes the successive hikes in US rates the upset of her career. The aforementioned announced bankruptcy of First Republic Bank, whose business depended on low-interest mega loans for stunning houses of very solvent clients.
The civic challenge that has convinced her to return to Turkey after half her life is far from the duplexes of Manhattan, the swimming pools of Silicon Valley and the corridors of Washington. She also from Goldman Sachs carpets – where she began and developed risk studies for nine years – and from Greystone credit, in whose direction she was until December.
Her husband, Batur Biçer, a wealthy adviser in New York, was already her partner at the University of the Bosporus, where she – the daughter of an engineer and a mathematics professor – studied Engineering. Erkan graduated with the best grades from the most prestigious university in the country, which declared her “student of the decade”.
Something that opened the scholarships for his postgraduate degrees in Finance at Princeton and, later, Harvard and Stanford.
Today, it gives its name to the scholarship program for students who excel in science from families without resources. “Honesty, hard work and humility” is his motto.
Her feminism extends to the International Women’s Forum, which brings together -by invitation only- powerful women from around the world, from Hillary Clinton to Nobel laureates. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
She gave classes and now she will be examined for her performance and independence. A monetary policy with fewer shocks for the markets and in the supermarket will depend on his pulse and seduction capacity.
