ISTANBUL — Prices have soared on imported goods, scaring buyers and sellers. Sales are off as Turks delay purchases or cut back. Everyone is quoting the exchange rate, feverishly calculating what to do with his or her savings, large and small, and watching the price of goods daily.

“My pension is not enough,” Zerrin Yildirim said as she sat with a friend on the steps of their apartment building in an old quarter of Istanbul, bemoaning the prices in the nearby fruit and vegetable market.

Turks across the country have been thrown into a frenzy as the Turkish lira has lost 25 percent of its value since last week. A standoff between Turkey and the United States, which has imposed sanctions, accelerated a long decline in the lira this year over fears of mismanagement of the economy.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making several speeches a day, casting the economic crisis as a national struggle, and laying the blame for the lira’s fall on foreign powers. In the latest, on Tuesday, he called on Turks to boycott American electronic products.