Live Breaking News & Updates on Catastrophic Crisis
Stay updated with breaking news from Catastrophic crisis. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
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 ....
Woman aged 28 who held up a bank allegedly with a toy pistol because she was so desperate to get money out to pay for the cancer care for her sister? her case is currently going through the courts. i just want to know for you as a minister, but also as a human being, do you have deep sympathy with what she did? i certainly do have deep sympathy with that particular lady and with most or all lebanese people that are really suffering and trying to find solutions where their governments have failed to give them solutions. as i said, those solutions should have been found years and years ago, at least since the crisis started. we should have put restrictions as to how we handle the banking issue because we knew every government that passed this one and the one before and the one before, they knew that we should have put a legal framework. i come from a legal background, stephen, and i am against violence. but when the people felt ....
Which, of course, has collapsed and indeed in the viability of the banks. that s why people are going in with guns, holding them up to get their money out while they can before it becomes worthless. and to me, what you re telling me doesn t seem to fix the problem. no, no, no, absolutely. it absolutely doesn t fix the problem, stephen, because the people have been really. . .they lost trust in all the governments that passed in the past at least three years since the crisis really hit hard lebanon, because many of those actions that the imf today is asking for, they should have been taken by previous governments three years ago. so the budget should have been done three years ago. capital control to protect money. people should have been done three years ago. thinking about restructuring the banking sector and working on banking secrecy law to fight corruption again should have been done three years ago. so we are trying ....
According to the united nations, are now living in poverty. many of them have no access to piped water. they do not get electricity any more. they are dependent, many of them, on emergency assistance. this in a country which prided itself for years on its prosperity. why would they believe a single optimistic promise that you have just delivered to me? let me tell you, stephen, i have been really arming myself and arming our government with a lot of optimism. and i kept. they used to, you know, they still do call me the optimistic minister because i m very hopeful and i m very confident that lebanon, as we did in the past, will manage to get out of this crisis. we have a lot of. the danger is they won t continue to call you the optimist. ....