ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey’s Central Bank stunned the markets Thursday, raising interest rates by 6.25% — the highest hike since Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister in 2003. The move strengthened the lira, which has lost 40% of its value this year, and defied Erdogan, who had expressed his aversion to an interest rate increase only hours earlier.

Analysts praised the increase as a long overdue correction for an economy where inflation rose to 18% last month. On Aug. 13, the lira fell to as low as 7.24 against the dollar. In August 2017, the lira stood at 3.5 to the dollar.

“It’s unusual because President Erdogan has been putting a lot of pressure on the Central Bank not to increase interest rates,” said Cem Oyvat, a Turkish economist who teaches at the University of Greenwich in London. Oyvat told Al-Monitor that Thursday’s meeting by the Central Bank’s monetary policy committee was late in coming: ”If the Central Bank had met earlier, maybe they would have kept the dollar-TL rate at lower levels."

The dollar-lira exchange rate see-sawed through the day. In the morning, Erdogan told a meeting of business executives in Ankara, “What is happening today in our economy is not a crisis, but only manipulation. Such manipulative attacks are connected to outside of our country. These days will pass.”