The first phase of financial liberalization in Turkey did not produce an outcome that has been highlighted as a defining feature of financialization (cf. Lapavitsas 2009, 2011). That is to say, commercial banks have not become more distant from industrial and commercial capital, notwithstanding the objectives reflected in the wording of World Bank’s SALs and Decree no.70 to the contrary. The Turkish experience does not provide evidence for the detachment and/or the severance of financial from productive capital (cf. Wood 2007). Indeed, it emerges as a distinct modality of financialization that would not entail such a detachment, but rather the blurring of frontiers between financial and non-financial activities within the non-financial corporations too (cf. Serfati 2011; Türel 2009: 154), as the evolving process of financial liberalization revealed in its successive phases.
