Hitting the local elections campaign trail, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan touted the quadrillions of Turkish lira (TRY) invested around the country by successive governments run by his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the past 16 years—but Erdogan gave the numbers in old lira, with no mention of the decision made under him in 2005 to knock six zeros off the currency.

Bloomberg on February 5 wrote how Erdogan talked of 35 quadrillion lira ploughed into the province of Gaziantep, 40 quadrillion for Antalya and 23.5 quadrillion for Erzurum.

In fact, the spending on Antalya, one of Turkey’s 10 largest cities, for instance, amounts to just 40bn in the re-denominated lira, or just under $8bn.

“If the figures were uttered in the correct way, they would seem low,” the news agency quoted Emin Karagozoglu, an economist at Bilkent University in Ankara, as saying.

Fiscal stimulus ended in crash
Modern Turkey’s longest-serving ruler has in fact pumped plenty of fiscal stimulus into the Middle East’s biggest economy. He’s presided over years of supercharged credit growth that ended in a currency crash last summer.

Erdogan, who first became prime minister in 2003, takes pride in having overhauled the lira, saying his government “saved the honor of the currency” after a period when people had to pay one million lira to use a public toilet, Bloomberg noted.

In all fairness, Erdogan isn’t alone in making references to old lira. The practice is still widespread in common speech and is also used by the president’s opponents. In October, for example, the main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, complained that the government paid 692 quadrillion liras in interest on its borrowings in the past 14 years, according to the news agency report.