Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

In late June, Sri Lanka's Prime Minister, Renil Rick Remensing, announced that the country's economy

had collapsed. There was no money left to pay for imports of necessities like food,

fuel and medicine, and the country was seeking help from neighboring countries and the IMF.

Rick Reminsing, who had taken office in May, emphasized the monumental scale of the task the

country faced in turning around an economy, he said was heading for rock bottom.

Sri Lanka is going through its worst economic crisis since it gained independence from

Britain almost 75 years ago. Protesters have been on the streets for the last five months,

furious about the economic mismanagement, the corruption,

the authoritarianism and the nepotism of the Rajapaksa brothers, who've dominated Sri Lankan politics

for decades. In July, videos emerged on social media, showing people taking over the

presidential palace. We saw protesters in palace bedrooms at the palace gym and swimming in the palace swimming pool.

The sheer scale of the protests and the anger of the population prompted Godabaya Rajapaksa,

the president at the time, to flee the country on a military jet to the Maldives and later

to Singapore where he turned in his resignation by email.

Sri Lanka's economic collapse has been blamed on the Rajapaksa brothers for heavily

borrowing to build Chinese-backed projects, for their corrupt mismanagement of the economy and for their

ill-considered policymaking, which included a ban on fertiliser imports in 2019.

When Godabaya Rajapaksa resigned, MPs replaced him with the Prime Minister, Rick Reminsing,

who I mentioned earlier, a man that protesters hated so much

that they burnt down his house a few weeks ago. With its foreign currency reserves depleted,

Sri Lanka, a nation of 22 million people, has run out of money to import fuel and other

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