A Conversation With Ajmal Ahmady, Afghanistan’s Former Central Bank Chief
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2021
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over the last week and a half, the world has watched in shock at the dizzying speed of the collapse in Afghanistan. Events are still unfolding, so the future remains extremely uncertain. One former official who has been outspoken in recent days is Ajmal Ahmady, who was running Afghanistan's central bank on an interim basis right up until the government fell. On this episode, we speak with Ahmady about what operations at the bank looked like in relatively normal times, how events transpired in the government's final days, and the future of Afghanistan's economy under Taliban rule.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. |
| 0:14.4 | I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe, why isn't it all? |
| 0:18.0 | So Joe, clearly one of the top news stories, probably the top news story at the moment is |
| 0:23.8 | the situation in Afghanistan and the very, very swift change in the direction of events |
| 0:30.6 | there. |
| 0:31.6 | So just a week ago, things were, I guess I want to say relatively normal, obviously the |
| 0:38.6 | Taliban had advanced throughout the country, but Kabul was still operating on a fairly |
| 0:44.5 | normal basis and then fast forward just seven days or so. |
| 0:49.2 | We're recording this on August 20th. |
| 0:52.0 | Everything has changed. |
| 0:53.9 | I think it was last Saturday or last Sunday, I'm sort of losing track of the dates. |
| 0:58.7 | There was clearly a very rapid advance of the Taliban, but then there was some questions |
| 1:04.5 | like, oh, how many days or weeks will there be a pressure on Kabul? |
| 1:08.7 | And then it seemed to happen in basically an instant. |
| 1:12.0 | So clearly there are a lot of questions swirling around the situation in Afghanistan right |
| 1:16.7 | now, but given that this is all bots, we're going to focus on one question in particular, |
| 1:22.9 | which is what exactly happens to the Afghani economy. |
| 1:27.1 | And we have the perfect person to talk about it. |
| 1:30.5 | We're going to be speaking with Ajmal Ahmadi, who has been the central banker in Afghanistan |
| 1:37.0 | since the middle of last year before that he was the minister of commerce and industry. |
| 1:43.0 | He has left the country under very, very chaotic circumstances, but he's been very gracious |
| 1:49.4 | in his time and agreed to come on all bots. |
... |
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