This is Planet Money from NPR.

Emer Picard was born and raised in Istanbul.

In the 90s when he was in middle school, he worked summers at the city's Grand Bazaar,

a sprawling covered market of stalls and shops.

I have very fond memories.

People came from all over Turkey to buy everything from furniture to clothing to pots

and pans.

Emer's family ran a jewelry store there, selling gold coins and traditional Turkish

furniture.

I started out as a runner boy, sweeping the floors, cleaning the windows, setting the

displays.

Then I graduated to ferrying gold and cash around.

Today, Emer lives in London, where he follows Turkish politics and economics for his job

at the Eurasia group.

But he's been steeped in this stuff since he was a teenager, working at the family jewelry

business.

I remember one of the guys working at our shop, who's in age somewhere between my father

and my grandfather, had kept a daily record of the Lyra dollar exchange rate dating from

1960 in a small bookie kept.

I was just fascinating to see how the exchange rate went from one Lyra to the dollar to, by

the time I was done at the buzzer to about 1.6 million Lyra to the dollar.

Turkey's economy has been very up and down over the years, and now it's down again.

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