Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan should be thought of as “an obsessive, volatile CEO” in charge of an economy that “has been waiting to blow up for some months”, Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said in an August 2 television interview.

Though the US imposition of sanctions on Turkey over the pastor Andrew Brunson detention has turned the screw on the country’s economy—the Turkish lira (TRY) hit its latest all-time low against the dollar in early August 3 trading, weakening to 5.1110—the sanctions could be seen as “just a trigger” for the release of economic strife that has been in store for a country with “screwy accounting”, Posen said on Bloomberg Television.

Under constitutional changes approved in last year’s referendum, Turkey became a presidential republic after the late June elections making Erdogan an executive president with few checks and balances to contend with. His unconventional “Erdoganomics” mean he regularly pushes for cheaper money to drive more growth despite the market consensus that the Turkish economy is overheating with roaring inflation and a collapsing currency and is in bad need of substantial interest rate hikes.

Fears that Erdogan has now essentially taken charge of monetary policy rose with the stunning decision of the central bank at its last monetary policy committee meeting to keep rates on hold and the appointment of the president’s politically inexperienced son-in-law Berat Albayrak as finance and treasury minister.

“With Turkey it is like having an obsessive, volatile CEO, you’ve got a dictatorial leader in there… He appointed his son-in-law finance minister and appointing son-in-laws is always a sign of bad policy and the markets are now reacting,” added Posen.

“If you just promise too much and lean on the central bank to be easy and you pay no attention to markets, you end up over-extending especially if you are a populist pandering to a nativist group,” Posen added.

Taking on the question on whether Turkey should call in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for assistance, Posen said the “IMF can do the right thing for Turkey… [it would] essentially be giving them bridge financing”.

In a note to investors responding to the Posen interview, Timothy Ash, senior emerging markets sovereign strategist at BlueBay asset management, said: “Actually, forget about the IMF. Posen could do the right thing for Turkey by joining the [central bank’s] MPC as an independent member—we might actually see half decent monetary policy by then which is really what Turkey needs at this stage.”

He added: “[It’s] not really a case at this stage of getting the IMF in, it’s about having a credible/believable macro policy mix, and particularly in the monetary policy space. The [central bank] has more or less lost all credibility at this stage having been continuously behind the curve in terms of its rate decisions.”