Inflationary crises, like the one looming over Turkey, are bad news for any government, but they are especially dangerous for a certain subset of authoritarians: populist strongmen.

They are unusually prone to creating this sort of crisis, unusually inhibited from fixing it and unusually slow to recover. They have, on average, higher rates of inflation and more artificially undervalued currencies. Their central banks are less independent, making them less capable of intervening.

Potentially catastrophic on their own, these are symptoms of a set of weaknesses and liabilities that go beyond monetary policy to the core of populist strongman rule.

Before Turkey, there Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, who oversaw their country’s fall from prosperity to ruin, partly by plowing into an inflationary crisis.