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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 lebanes ....
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 ti ....
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. ....
Level agreement deal, we literally put on the table about 12 scenarios that really tackled all those issues and most of those draft laws, including the budget, the capital controls law, the banking secrecy law, the banking restructuring law. none of the scenarios we put on the table, stephen, was easy. they were all very difficult, very challenging scenarios. it is true you mention now that the budget was not very realistic as far as the numbers go, but the minister of finance in lebanon himself, in his own words, said that this is not the ideal budget. this is an emergency budget. it s not a budget, really, with a with a major economic vision. it s that word again, it s a fantasy budget. that s a budgetjust to, you know, get the get the government and get the numbers straight. ....
To fix that now. and again, i go back to the budget. i tell you, this budget is only a starting point because there was no way we could start with a perfect budget and now we are working on budget 2023, which looks totally different, has a totally different approach for next year because we know that the budget that was passed this year needed a lot of refinement. i was not a big fan of it myself as part of the cabinet, but we had to start somewhere. 0k. it s not the best one. we had to start somewhere. we can talk economic policymaking, we can talk budgets, and then we can talk the real lives of ordinary lebanese people. so just going back to these people, and there are dozens of them in recent weeks and months, who have in the end resorted to bank holdups to try and get their cash out of the banks. and as we speak, the banks are essentially closed to retail customers. tell me, do you have sympathy, for example, for the young ....