a total of thirty seven people including 23 children were killed in an attack that has shocked the nation. those are the headlines. now on bbc news it s time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i m stephen sackur. lebanon is experiencing one of the most disastrous economic collapses of the last 100 years. the national economy is less than half the size it was just three years ago. one powerful symbol of the catastrophe, people are holding up banks in a desperate attempt to get their money out, amid rampant inflation and a currency crisis. my guest is lebanon s minister of economy and trade, amin salam. politicians have failed lebanon for decades. will that change before the meltdown is complete? minister amin salam, currently in washington, dc, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. thank you, stephen, glad to be with you. well, we re delighted to have you in our washington studio. let me ask you, minister, do you think you and your government are levelling with the lebanese peop
in a desperate attempt to get their money out, amid rampant inflation and a currency crisis. my guest is lebanon s minister of economy and trade, amin salam. politicians have failed lebanon for decades. will that change before the meltdown is complete? minister amin salam, currently in washington, dc, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. thank you, stephen, glad to be with you. well, we re delighted to have you in our washington studio. let me ask you, minister, do you think you and your government are levelling with the lebanese people, and indeed with the international community as well, about the scale of the economic catastrophe that your country is currently living through? absolutely. stephen, let me tell you, it has been quite a challenging year since our government took office and we started really working on a very tough mission to recover the economy in lebanon and to fix all the mess that the past two decades have left lebanon in. our government came with a big title th
confidence back to lebanon. it only brings confidence. no, no, no. ..if the imf and your people believe that your government will behave responsibly with this new source of revenue. we are banking. we are banking, stephen, on the fact that once the imf agreement is there, the imf will hold the lebanese government accountable. the reason we are seeking an imf deal is because we know that we need somebody to be on top of this government to put a work scope and to audit every three months how we re going to spend our monies. this is why we are seeking an imf work plan, not because the imf is only going to give us money, but the imf s will help us manage this money, will help us manage our economy, will help us manage our banking sector. so the imf s role is. in a couple of words, because we re almost out of time. in a couple of words, are you going to get a bailout deal with the imf in the next
exactly. it s a budget to get the government off the hook. it bears no relation to reality. and you re funded. let s get down to detail. one of your big problems. and i acknowledge you re not the minister of finance, you re the minister of economy and trade. so this isn t directly your responsibility. but you must acknowledge in your role that it is a total catastrophe, that your currency crisis simply gets worse, not better. you ve got at least three different exchange rates. your official rate is, what, 1,500 lebanese pounds to the dollar? the actual street rate is something like 37,000 lebanese pounds to the dollar. nobody in your country believes that your banks are anything other than bust, and that s why so many lebanese people are queuing around the block trying to get their money out of the banks. the banks have now closed, and the only way it seems to get any cash, your own cash, out of a bank in lebanon is to hold it up with a gun.
government to get done, not only the cabinet should have been done about five months ago, but lebanon, as you know, goes through a lot of political turmoil. and we have had elections, parliamentary elections, that really played a big role in delaying all this process at least three to four months, two months prior to the elections and two months post elections, because most of the decisions that our government was taking, including the prior actions that were requested by the imf, none of them were very popular decisions. they were all very difficult decisions. so the previous parliament didn t want to adopt them, even though we put them in a form of draft laws. and the new the new parliament as well, didn t want to adopt them immediately without doing further research and study into them. that really made us waste about four months. it was really hard luck