Wandering through the shattered capital in the hours and days after the explosion, it was hard to imagine things could get any worse. Yet they did
Lebanon cannot afford such a delay. It tipped into economic crisis in 2019, the result of a years-long Ponzi scheme overseen by the central bank, which borrowed billions from an outsized banking industry to sustain a currency peg. The scheme unravelled when banks no longer took in enough fresh deposits to keep it going. Mr Diab estimated there was an $83bn hole in their balance-sheets last year.
Once reliably pegged at 1,500 to the dollar, the Lebanese pound traded as low as 23,000 on the black market in July . It has since rebounded to nearly 15,000—still a 90% depreciation in two years. Inflation was 101% in June, and 222% for food. Half the country now lives below the poverty line. A family of five needs 3.5m pounds, five times the minimum wage, just to buy food each month, estimate researchers at the American University of Beirut.
A glance at newspaper headlines over the past few weeks offers a bleak portrait of collapse. A young girl died from a scorpion sting that could not be treated for lack of antivenom in depleted hospitals and pharmacies. A teenaged boy died trying to battle wildfires that the bankrupt state is struggling to control. A man was killed in a traffic accident while queuing for fuel on a highway south of Beirut.
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