Turkey’s tight election

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Turkey’s tight election’

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Monday, May 15th. And this is your FT News Briefing.

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Turkey’s presidential election is too close to call. Twitter has got a new CEO, but how many strings is she going to be allowed to pull? And inflation in Argentina hit 109 per cent last month. And the government’s trying to get a lid on things before an election this autumn. Plus, sand? It’s everywhere, but the FT’s Kenza Bryan tells us there is still a shortage.

Kenza Bryan
This teeny tiny commodity that we don’t really think about very much could be the factor that’s causing construction costs to keep rising beyond what they should be.

Marc Filippino
I’m Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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Both Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his challenger, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu claim to lead Turkey’s presidential race. Turkey’s state news agency said that President Erdoğan got just under 50 per cent of yesterday’s vote, while Kılıçdaroğlu secured 45 per cent. This was based on the count from 93 per cent of the ballot boxes. Kılıçdaroğlu’s allies objected to those figures and said the agency was using deceptive tactics. But if the figures hold true, neither one would have secured enough votes to win the presidency outright, and it would force an unprecedented runoff election in two weeks’ time.

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Elon Musk is trying to bring advertisers back to his social media site, so he’s hired advertising heavyweight Linda Yaccarino to be Twitter’s new CEO. She doesn’t come from social media. She previously headed advertising at the US entertainment giant NBCUniversal. Here’s the FT’s Hannah Murphy on what Yaccarino is expected to do.

Hannah Murphy
So the hope is that Linda will come in and mend those relationships, will smooth over those tensions and be able to bring back those ad dollars that Twitter have lost. Now, Elon’s come and said, you know, as much as 50 per cent of revenue has been lost as advertisers have pulled away. The hope is to get that back at a moment when the company’s finances are pretty shaky and Musk has been undergoing a pretty dramatic cost-cutting effort in order to right the ship.

Marc Filippino
Now, even though Linda Yaccarino will be CEO, Hannah says Elon Musk is hardly stepping back.

Hannah Murphy
We’ve already seen Elon Musk himself come out and say that he’s going to remain as Twitter’s executive chair and chief technology officer, which means he’ll be overseeing the product, engineering, software, systems, operations, etc. So there’s the suggestion that while Linda is there as a figurehead and also to mend those advertising relationships, Elon might still be pulling the strings behind the scenes, particularly in terms of building the product in the direction that he wants it to go in. The decision making about the future of what the platform looks like, the look and feel, the user experience, is really going to be more down to what Elon decides.

Marc Filippino
Hannah Murphy is a technology correspondent for the FT.

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Central banks around the globe have been raising interest rates. We’ve been telling you about that. But Argentina’s got a plan that will blow them all out of the water. Today, officials in Buenos Aires will announce measures to try and stave off the country’s worst economic crisis in decades. They plan to raise interest rates 6 per cent, not up to 6 per cent. They’re bumping rates 6 per cent higher. So the new rate will be 97 per cent. Argentina has been printing money to finance a large government deficit that’s driven up inflation, which last month hit 109 per cent.

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If you’re building a house, you might find that costs are jumping higher. Big infrastructure projects from China to Africa have driven up demand and created a shortage of sand. Sand is the most used natural material in the world. And it’s critical not just for construction, but other major industries as well. To find out more, I’m joined by the FT’s Kenza Bryan. Hi, Kenza.

Kenza Bryan
Hi there.

Marc Filippino
All right. So I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this. How can there be a shortage of sand? I mean, it’s kind of everywhere, right?

Kenza Bryan
Well, the short answer is there isn’t globally a shortage of sand. It’s on our beaches, it’s on our seabeds. But there’s a shortage of sand available for construction, for manufacturing and for some processes like fracking for oil and gas, partly because all those processes need a certain quality of sand that you can’t find everywhere. And partly because sand is actually expensive and difficult to extract in an environmentally friendly way.

Marc Filippino
So how is this affecting projects around the world? I mean, you mentioned this big port project in Singapore in your story that you wrote.

Kenza Bryan
Well, to start with, it’s become harder for places like Singapore to obtain the vast quantities of sand that they want and they need. And for these land reclamation projects to go ahead and because a bunch of countries like Malaysia and Thailand and others have on and off in recent years been bringing in export bans on sand, at least on natural sand, which is the type that Singapore imports. And because these countries have realised that first of all, they need sand for construction domestically and also the export of natural sand can have massive repercussions in terms of flooding, risk and safety and environmental concerns for their own people.

Marc Filippino
Kenza, your story also mentions illegal sand mining. How big of a problem is that?

Kenza Bryan
Yes, so the UN has been warning for years that most of the world’s demand for sand is met by illegal sand mining. So one UN scientist told me, sand’s easy to grab. You have a shovel and a truck and you can improvise as an entrepreneur. It’s almost the easiest thing you can sell illegally and it’s obviously very hard to trace.

Marc Filippino
So then going back to prices, how is the cost of sand filtering down to consumers?

Kenza Bryan
What’s interesting about sand is, as far as I know, there isn’t one price that you can really track globally, partly because there are so many informal supply chains and ways to obtain sand. So we had to do a bit of detective work to figure out whether the cost of a single grain of sand. And what we found was that, for example, one sand miner from June plans to raise the price of sand products by up to a fifth. And it said that that was because of a mixture of labour costs, transport costs, material costs, manufacturing costs. The higher price of sand and other commodities could be used as an excuse for construction companies to push up the price of building things beyond what you would expect, given that energy prices have been flattening out.

Marc Filippino
That’s the FT’s Kenza Bryan. Thanks, Kenza.

Kenza Bryan
Thanks.

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Marc Filippino
Before we go, two extremely rare and unknown portraits by Rembrandt have been unearthed after 200 years. Experts at the auction house Christie’s were doing a routine valuation of a private collection in the UK when they discovered the portraits. They depict an elderly husband and wife. The two eight-inch portraits by the 17th century Dutch master have never been on public display. They’ll go on sale in London this July with an estimated value of £5mn to £8mn for the pair.

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You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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