As we put another month behind us, the weather has started to cool down with the rain over the last few days—at least here in Ankara.

Unfortunately, the war between Iran and the United States has flared up again, with neither country showing any willingness to sit at the table—or, more accurately, to make concessions. The U.S. is pursuing a strategy of intentionally weakening Iran by targeting its petroleum-dependent economy to push the country into a corner. Iran, on the other hand, is attempting to put pressure on the U.S. administration by lobbying against Trump ahead of the U.S. midterm elections to cost him the vote, claiming that this war—which originated with Israel—is none of the American public’s concern.

From my perspective, the failure of both sides to reach an agreement poses serious risks for themselves as well as the global economy. As the fight against post-pandemic global inflation driven by monetary expansion continues, rising oil prices will reignite cost-push inflation.

Smaller economies in particular are suffering far more from this process compared to countries like the U.S., which possess many more policy tools and leverage the immense power of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. Quite frankly, Turkey is right at the top of that list. Beyond the added costs from rising oil prices, I also expect our geopolitical position to lead to a drop in tourist arrivals.

Inflation Debates and Economic Policies in Turkey

While on the topic, let me pivot to another closely related issue.

Lately, I’ve heard people around me throw around inflation numbers like 40% or 50%, completely detached from the CPI data. Let me be clear upfront: I don’t think the true figure is wildly different from the reported CPI. There might be a deviation of a few percentage points, but pinpointing the exact number in such a broad dataset is nearly impossible anyway. We could argue that inflation might be 32% instead of 30%, but I don’t subscribe to the view that it’s vastly higher.

To put it simply, the inflation rate isn’t calculated based on a single region or a specific product group; it’s based on a common basket that covers a wide array of items across the entire country.

A few years ago, house prices and rents were skyrocketing while fruit and vegetable prices remained relatively stable. Today, housing price growth has slowed, but vegetable prices have reached abnormal levels. Faced with these fluctuations, people naturally focus on the price increases they encounter most in their daily lives, offering guesses like “I think it’s this rate” or “I think it’s that rate.”

I know civil servants renting homes for 8,000–9,000 TRY in certain districts of Anatolia, just as I know that a similar home in Istanbul rents for 50,000 TRY. Because price increases happen on a percentage basis, nominal numbers in major metropolises like Istanbul constantly reach staggering heights. However, not every product and service in the economy increases at the same rate or pace.

While I don’t think the public’s approach is entirely justified, it’s fair to admit that policymakers have fallen short in this process.

Following the general elections, swift action was taken under Mehmet Şimşek and the new Central Bank Governor, giving the public the impression that “things were about to change.” However, instead of decisive monetary tightening, they opted for a policy that tightened gradually but ultimately remained insufficiently aggressive. Because of an approach that felt like “let’s not make things too hard on anyone, just inconvenience them a little,” inflation has failed to drop permanently below the 30% range.

Alongside these criticisms, even though I believe policymakers made wrong moves, we shouldn’t ignore three major exogenous shocks beyond any government’s control that hindered the disinflation process:

  • The February Earthquake: The devastation of an entire region, the loss of tens of thousands of lives, and the heavy economic burden consequently placed on the state.
  • The 2025 Drought: One of the dry spells in 50–60 years, which dealt a massive shock to food supply and fed directly into prices.
  • Geopolitical Conflicts: The chain of events starting with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict right next door and escalating into the Iran-U.S. war, driving Brent crude from $60 to nearly $120 a barrel. This amplified the impact on energy imports—long one of Turkey’s structural economic vulnerabilities—and passed costs directly through to prices.

Given the polarizing discourse in this country, I feel compelled to reiterate: this is strictly a situational analysis, intended neither to flatter nor to criticize.

In my view, inflation remaining stuck around 30% for so long is a combination of policymaker errors and exogenous shocks. My personal estimate is that had even a few of these negative factors not occurred, inflation could have dropped to the 20–23% range. And if policymakers had pursued a genuinely aggressive fight against inflation backed by fiscal policy, seeing inflation drop to 15–17% by the end of this year would not have been out of reach.

Monthly Wrap-Up: Reading, Software, and Investments

So, how was my month?

I had actually planned to spend more time reading this month, but I didn’t reach my target. I haven’t even been able to finish a finance book I started a week ago—I’m still only halfway through.

On the other hand, I spent a good chunk of my time on my own software projects. Just as I tell myself, “Okay, this app is done,” a new feature pops into my head. I say, “Let me add that too,” and before I know it, hours have flown by. Still, I’d say it was a very productive month on the software development front.

When it comes to finance and economics, I couldn’t really bring myself to focus over the last 10 days. Generating a nice return from the Çitlekçi IPO based on my valuation made me a bit complacent, which led me to slack off on market tracking and new analyses.

I basically buried myself in games, movies, TV shows, and anime.

Writing this post now makes me realize just how lazy I’ve been. I suppose that’s one of the most useful parts of these monthly write-ups: seeing what you’ve done at the end of the month laid out in front of you makes self-criticism a whole lot easier.

Book Notes

This month, I picked up Yeni Dünya (New World), a collection of short stories by Sabahattin Ali. The author’s distinct narrative style makes it a book you can finish almost in one sitting.

I also finally wrapped up Frank Herbert’s six-book core Dune series, which I started back in May, during the final days of this month. Next up are the six books across the Dynasty (Hanedanlık) and Legends (Efsaneler) series. I’ll make an effort to get through those as well.

If time permits, I’ll try to review the entire series in a separate post—similar to the piece I wrote on the Foundation universe—to leave my own note for posterity.

Books Finished in August:

  • Chapterhouse: Dune — Frank Herbert
  • Heretics of Dune — Frank Herbert
  • The Crime at the Red House — Molly Thynne
  • Yeni Dünya — Sabahattin Ali

August 2026 Watch List

Total logs: 80

Movie List (65)

TV Show List (15)

  • Bodyguard — Season 1 | Release Year: 2018 | My Rating: 8/10 | IMDb: 8/10 | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7493974/
  • Task — Season 1 | Release Year: 2025 | My Rating: 7/10 | IMDb: 7.9/10 | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28013708/
  • Daredevil: Born Again — Season 2 | Release Year: 2026 | My Rating: 5/10 | IMDb: 8.7/10 |
  • Daredevil: Born Again — Season 1 | Release Year: 2025 | My Rating: 6/10 | IMDb: 8.4/10 | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18923754/
  • Game of Thrones — Season 8 | Release Year: 2019 | My Rating: 9/10 | IMDb: 6.4/10 |
  • Game of Thrones — Season 7 | Release Year: 2017 | My Rating: 10/10 | IMDb: 9/10 |
  • Game of Thrones — Season 6 | Release Year: 2016 | My Rating: 10/10 | IMDb: 9/10 |
  • Game of Thrones — Season 5 | Release Year: 2015 | My Rating: 10/10 | IMDb: 8.7/10 |
  • Game of Thrones — Season 4 | Release Year: 2014 | My Rating: 10/10 | IMDb: 9.3/10 |
  • Game of Thrones — Season 3 | Release Year: 2013 | My Rating: 10/10 | IMDb: 8.9/10 |
  • Game of Thrones — Season 2 | Release Year: 2012 | My Rating: 10/10 | IMDb: 8.8/10 |
  • Game of Thrones — Season 1 | Release Year: 2011 | My Rating: 10/10 | IMDb: 9/10 | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944947/
  • House of the Dragon — Season 3 | Release Year: 2026 | My Rating: 8/10 | IMDb: 8.3/10 |
  • House of the Dragon — Season 2 | Release Year: 2024 | My Rating: 8/10 | IMDb: 8.3/10 |
  • House of the Dragon — Season 1 | Release Year: 2022 | My Rating: 8/10 | IMDb: 8.3/10 | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11198330/

When it comes to TV shows, I usually wait for a full season to wrap up so I can binge all the episodes at once; I’ve been doing it this way for years. With a busy schedule, waiting for new weekly episodes or following a release calendar just isn’t for me.

Time flies anyway. Before I can even wonder, “When is this coming out?”, the season finale has already aired. So I add it to my list and watch every episode back-to-back once the season is complete.

House of the Dragon was one of those cases. Once the season ended, my urge to watch peaked, and combined with my recent bout of laziness, it naturally led into a full Game of Thrones marathon and the movies it reminded me of.

Needless to say, the end result wasn’t pretty.

You know that feeling when you eat way too much even though you know you shouldn’t, and then feel a wave of regret stepping on the scale the next morning? I think that’s pretty much where I am right now.

Developments in the World of AI

Let’s take a look at some AI news.

My disappointment with Gemini continues. Despite sitting on a larger pool of data than almost any company in the world, I feel their models still lag behind competitors. Chinese models are advancing so rapidly that Gemini’s competitive standing faces increasing pressure month after month.

Mid-month saw the release of Gemini 3.7 Flash. Despite improvements over the 3.6 model released in July, it didn’t feel like the major leap forward I was hoping for in my day-to-day use. While there are noticeable refinements, I was expecting greater progress, particularly in reasoning capabilities.

It’s well known that Google is working on the next major generation of Gemini. What I’m really curious about is how much further they can push the current architecture and whether the next generation can close the gap with competitors.

There were also noteworthy developments over at Hugging Face, home to millions of open-source AI models and datasets. Nvidia’s aggressive investments across various segments of the AI ecosystem clearly signal that they don’t want to remain just a hardware manufacturer.

Frankly, Nvidia isn’t sitting still. To avoid repeating the mistakes Intel made years ago, they continue to invest heavily across virtually every corner of the AI landscape.

One of the developments that surprised me most this month came from Meta.

Meta announced new work on Muse Spark 1.2 and Muse Code. I haven’t tested Muse Code extensively yet, but my trials with Muse Spark 1.2 were quite impressive. Especially when deployed as an AI agent, it completed assigned tasks thoroughly and precisely as requested, rivaling much larger models.

What’s more, I think its price-to-performance ratio is remarkably compelling.

In the final days of the month, the GLM 5.3 Flash model was released.

This 320-billion-parameter model has been optimized to the point where it can run on a powerful local machine. While running a model of this size locally still requires substantial hardware investment, the sheer fact that models unthinkable for local execution a few years ago can now run on hardware accessible to individual users is remarkable in itself.

Outside of coding—especially when using it as an agent—I didn’t encounter any major issues. Looking at the results, its cost advantage combined with performance remarkably close to frontier models really gets me thinking about the future of open-source strategies driven by Chinese AI developers.

For enterprises in particular, AI usage can easily cost thousands of dollars a month. In a few years, when optimized, locally executable models that potentially outperform today’s top-tier models begin meeting these needs, whether companies will still be willing to shell out thousands in monthly subscription or API fees becomes a major question mark.

I believe this exact dynamic will be one of the key factors shaping the AI industry’s business model over the next few years.

Goals for Next Month and Closing

Next month, I aim to dive back into company valuations, spend more time studying, and read more books.

If I can at least finish the six books across the Dynasty and Legends series for now, that’ll be enough for me. 🙂

We’ll see how hard I end up kicking myself when writing next month’s post.

Wishing you all the best as we bid farewell to another month.