Turkey’s currency is in free fall. Its stock market is plunging. Interest rates are spiking (see charts). Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the long-ruling and increasingly dictatorial Turkish president, blames an international conspiracy led by the “interest rate lobby”.

The actual explanation is less exciting: Turkish banks and businesses borrowed hundreds of billions of US dollars and euros to fund a domestic construction boom in the years after the global financial crisis. Anyone familiar with the history of emerging market crises should be unsurprised by what is happening now.