Resilience is a great quality to have in life as well as in business. Some countries have it, some banking sectors have it, as do many CEOs. It means, to quote from Rudyard Kipling's If, "keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you". Turkey is a country that has been battered and bruised over the years with a string of financial crises and terrorist attacks, and more recently the tortuous nature of EU negotiations to deal with. Yet for all that, Turkey is on a roll, as we report this month (see page 58), with record foreign direct investment inflows, booming foreign trade and a thriving construction industry. Yet the challenges that the country faces - a yawning current account deficit and spiralling foreign debt among mem - are surmountable and the foreign banks buying into the domestic banking sector clearly support this idea.
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