Afghanistan’s Former Central Bank Chief on the Dire State of the Country’s Economy
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2022
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Afghanistan economy was already in bad shape, with heavy reliance on foreign dollars, prior to the collapse of the government and the takeover by the Taliban. Since the fall, things have gotten even worse, with inflation accelerating and GDP plunging. There are multiple factors at work, though the main one is the cutting off of outside sources of dollars. On this episode we speak with Ajmal Ahmady, the former head of Afghanistan's central bank, on the difficult situation, and how the economy might operate going forward.
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| 0:46.3 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odlots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. |
| 0:58.8 | And I'm Joe, why isn't it all? You know, Joe, it's obviously the start of a new year, |
| 1:04.7 | and I'm just thinking back to 2021, and there were so many things that happened. It's kind of |
| 1:11.8 | crazy when you think back. I mean, just think back this time last year, GameStop hadn't even really |
| 1:18.3 | begun to take off, and then it suddenly became such a big thing, but it feels like that happened, |
| 1:24.3 | I mean, absolutely ages ago. Yeah, it really does. I feel like there were some really big themes, |
| 1:31.0 | obviously. We don't need to go over them that happened in 2021, but there are also just a bunch |
| 1:36.4 | of smaller remarkable stories. Yeah, and you mentioned remarkable stories. So one of the |
| 1:42.8 | very big things that happened last year was the fall of Afghanistan, and we had those dramatic |
| 1:49.0 | scenes out of capital, as people scrambled at the airport to try to get out of the country. |
| 1:55.6 | And it's one of those things, you know, at the time people were talking about how those pictures |
| 2:00.5 | were going to go down in history. It was all over the news. The news cycle focused on it a lot, |
| 2:06.4 | and we did an all lots episode on it at the time, but it's sort of fallen off the front pages since |
| 2:14.5 | then, and in the meantime, Afghanistan has really been struggling under Taliban rule. You see these |
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