ANKARA: The Turkish central bank sold $200 million dollars on Wednesday, market sources said, in a renewed fight to hold up the value of the lira.
The central bank has been selling dollars since Monday when it announced urgent and "strong" action to defend the currency and contain overheated bank lending.
In afternoon trading on Wednesday, the lira was being quoted at 1.9456 to the dollar.
It had been traded at 1.9498 on Tuesday, after falling on Monday to a record low level of 1.9740 immediately before the central bank announced its new measures.
On Wednesday the central bank sold $200 million in two auctions -- $50 million and $150 million, and opened the third for $150 million.
The bank had begun its intervention on the foreign exchange market by selling $2.25 billion on Monday.
It said it would pursue the new measures for as long as the lira was under pressure.
But market analysts were immediately sceptical that this policy, which involves using up foreign currency reserves, would be enough to shore up the lira for long and avert an increase in official short-term interest rates.
They said that the main factor putting the lira under pressure was the prospect that the US Federal Reserve bank would begin to wind down its special injections of money to stimulate the US economy.
This had caused an outflow of some risk investment funds from emerging economies, and the Turkish lira had been hit particularly hard, they said.
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