What Happened Turkey's central bank has hiked its benchmark interest rate from 17.75 percent to 24 percent, bringing a measure of relief to markets after the country's currency crashed over the summer. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had preceded the lender's announcement with a speech that slammed interest rates — a frequent bugbear of his — briefly spurring speculation that the bank would not move to arrest the slide of the currency and prevent the potential spread of Turkey's currency woes to other emerging economies. Erdogan also issued a decree in the country's Official Gazette stipulating that transactions for property sale, rental, business and service contracts must be conducted in Turkish lira, rather than in foreign currencies. The decree also forbade signatories from indexing their transactions to foreign currencies, while ordering existing contracts in other currencies to be switched to the lira by Oct. 12.