Turkey's central bank on Thursday slashed its main interest rate by 3.25 percentage points, the second cut in three months after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was "allergic" to high rates. The bank said the one-week repo rate was slashed to 16.50 percent from 19.75 percent, after a bigger cut in July of 4.25 percentage points.

The Bloomberg consensus had predicted a cut of 2.75 percentage points. The Turkish lira was at 5.68 to the US dollar, a rise of over 1.1 percent in value towards 1130 GMT after the bank's announcement.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019