The price of gold, considered a safe haven in investments, has broken records one after another since last year, while the number of precious metal deposit accounts kept in banks are on a rise in parallel with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's call on people to convert their foreign exchange savings into gold or Turkish lira in an attempt to help boost the value of the Turkish lira. Having broken successive records since last year, gold became one of the favorite investment instruments in 2016 again.

According to Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK) data, gold deposit accounts in banks soared to TL 16.964 billion ($4.54 billion) at the end of 2016 from TL 10.624 billion at the end of 2015. As far as the last one year's transactions are concerned, this figure corresponds to 51.6 tons of gold, based on the average gold price of TL 122 per gram.