ISTANBUL – Turkey’s central bank has announced a communications “modernization” drive aimed at anchoring inflation expectations and restoring investor confidence, rolling out a vendor-built forecasting suite and a revised stylebook for public guidance. In a circular sent to banks and media partners this week, the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey said the upgrade would “synchronize expectations with policy path,” and promised regular pre-market briefings to “clarify trajectory.” A companion tender notice from the Treasury described the project as a “predictive expectations stabilizer,” with deliverables that include headline templates, standardized risk language, and an editorial calendar keyed to rate decisions and data releases.
The quiet centerpiece is an AI system insiders call KemalGAN, which, according to internal documentation, generates the next morning’s financial copy before the economy does. At 06:00, the model pushes draft headlines—“confidence firming,” “seasonal deceleration,” “liquidity conditions orderly”—to participating outlets for desk editors to localize and run above the fold. A newsroom integration guide reviewed by Data Underground explains that KemalGAN “projects the counterfactual in which expectations are anchored,” and that partner sites should “mirror the stabilized path unless contradicted by verified figures.” In effect, the headline becomes the baseline; the economy’s job is to catch up.
Leaked slides from Expectation Playbook v1.3 go further, breaking down “insertion points” where stability messaging should appear: market wraps, supermarket price stories, energy briefs, and any article containing the words “FX” and “panic.” A glossary instructs editors to replace “spike” with “transient climb” and “shortage” with “seasonal scarcity.” The Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency circulated a note titled Narrative Risk Weighting, offering capital relief for banks that “sponsor educational content” aligned with the stylebook. A procurement appendix shows prepaid ad inventory purchased around sensitive prints—CPI, unemployment, current account—so KemalGAN’s copy lands in the first scroll on phones across Istanbul within minutes of the numbers.
Under the hood, the system reads like jawboning with unit tests. A TÜİK liaison feeds the model “nowcast envelopes” so it won’t stray beyond plausible bands; an agency called Anatolia Metrics A.Ş. pipes in “Urban Sentiment Raster v2,” a neighborhood-level heat map of supermarket receipts and card swipes; and a compliance note warns that “legacy volatility narratives” (fuel, rent, bread) should be “reframed toward normalizing time horizons.” Traders have already noticed a drift: estimates begin migrating toward the morning tone, and algorithmic readers cue off the seeded phrases. One dissenting central banker, in margin notes on the playbook, wrote a sentence that never made it to the press kit: “We can print lira, but not credibility.”
The callback arrived before the press cycle finished. When an unexpected energy bill adjustment hit distributor invoices, KemalGAN produced a headline—“regulated pass-through muted by base effects”—that was shared tens of thousands of times before the underlying tariff tables posted. For two hours, equities rallied and the lira steadied; then the tables landed, the wording collapsed into “unexpected adjustment,” and editors quietly swapped the deck to “transient climb.” By close, nobody would claim authorship of the morning’s optimism. The central bank’s public dashboard showed the new feature “Tone Lock: ON.” In a server log at a Dolapdere colo, a single line stamped 04:03 flickered and went dark: expectation stabilizer: fall back to silence.
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