It is the season when the media add a dash of economics to the local custom of turkey dinners by reporting on the price of turkeys. At the FRED Blog, we will deviate slightly from this tradition by reporting on prices in Turkey. FRED has lots of Turkish data. At the time of this writing, in fact, there were 1,981 series. One of the most popular is the consumer price index, displayed above. As FRED graphs go, this one is rather uninformative. The data are flattened into the zero line for most years. This is likely because the data in the latter years have much larger values than the early ones. Once you look at yearly inflation (below), this is confirmed: The country experienced very high inflation rates for a very long time, leading the price index to grow very fast. The regime change in 2007, clearly visible with the inflation data below, is interesting and coincides with Turkey’s adoption of an explicit inflation target in 2006. While inflation is still high by international standards, it’s not as wild and doesn’t gobble up people’s savings.

How these graphs were created: Search for the Turkey tag, and the consumer price index should be among the top choices. For the second graph, change units to “Percent Change from Year Ago.”

Suggested by Christian Zimmermann