In blaming his central bank for sabotaging his designs, Mr. Erdogan finds himself in powerful company. President Trump has intensified his attacks on his own central bank governor, Jerome H. Powell, asserting that high interest rates have made America less great than it could be.

India’s prime minister has attacked the independence of the central bank, prompting resignations, while undermining international faith in the veracity of official statistics.

For Turkish companies now confronting vast debts, lower interest rates should, in theory, shrink their debt burden, or at least make it cheaper to borrow more and defer any reckoning. Yet in reality, a great deal of Turkish debt is in dollars. Lower interest rates are likely to push down the value of the lira, which has the effect of magnifying dollar debts for companies that earn revenues in lira.

Mr. Erdogan has a penchant for decisive action, and these days are especially challenging for him. The economy fell into recession last year, resuming modest growth this year on the strength of spending unleashed by Mr. Erdogan ahead of national elections.

His stature was significantly weakened last month as his ruling party was thumped in a mayoral election in Istanbul. That result reflected voter anger over his imperious ways — especially his violent crackdown on dissent — as well as the growing perception that Turkey’s economy has drifted into danger.

That left Mr. Erdogan staring at two unpalatable options. He could accept higher interest rates to choke off inflation along with its attendant slowdown in growth, or stay true to form and keep the credit flowing. That would spur more economic expansion, but at the expense of Turkey’s credibility in the international marketplace, and further straining faith in the currency.

Most analysts assumed they knew how the story would go.

“I struggle to see how all of the sudden Turkish economic policymaking is going to turn more orthodox and transparent,” Nafez Zouk, chief emerging markets economist at Oxford Economics in London, said last month. “You just keep kicking the can down the road. We will see rate cuts this year.”