In Turkey the picture is getting complicated. Between 2000 and 2013, total credit increased by more than a factor of twelve—one of the sharpest and most sustained increases in the world. The boom granted Prime Minister (and now President) Recep Tayyip Erdogan the political capital required to consolidate control over an often-fractious system, ending decades of uncomfortable cohabitation between his own Anatolian religious conservatives, the pro-Western modernizers of the Greater Istanbul region, and a secularized military that saw itself as the guardian of the state.
