professor nisreen salti, let's begin with you.e scope of what is happening inebanon right now. >> to understand the nature of the crisis, it is perhaps useful to go back a little bit in time to see what led to the conditions. what we have is an economic system that was set up in the mid-1990's after the civil war and that instituted microeconomic policies that put in place economic ailments most structurally in the system. we ended up with an economy that is heavily reliant on imports for the bulk of its need for consumption and very low or discouraged local production. with this combination of two structural factors led to an unhealthy dependent on foreign currency inflows, pticular, dollar inflows. this privileged a small group of business interests, mainly cartels and bank owners and real estate agents -- i'm sorry, real estate developers. they were closely to to the political class. together, these two groups amassed enormous profit to the detriment of job creation, diversification. and gradually resulted -- growing inequality