The Lebanese pound has lost at least 50% of its value against the dollar since last year. About 220,000 people have lost their jobs. Food prices are up 58%. An estimated 75% of the population needs assistance of some kind. And over the last two nights, at least a dozen banks have been torched by protesters.

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The catalyst? Not coronavirus but a massive dollar shortage destroying an economy that relies on inflows of U.S. dollars to function.

In this episode, NLW breaks down how Lebanon models what it looks like for a currency to fail, and why this likely isn’t the last emerging market currency to experience a similar crisis in the months to come.

A few Snippets from the full transcript

Banks start to limit withdrawals, which is exactly what happened.

Banks started to limit how much could be withdrawn in USD and that creates more demand for dollars. All of a sudden that activity moves to the black markets because if banks won't allow people to withdraw money or get access to dollars, black markets will, but the black market price is not going to stay the same as that official peg.

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This keeps going on. As people start to see the peg fall further, they want to minimize loss.

They go from, "I don't want to lose the value that I would have had at that official peg going on the black market" to "The black markets, the only place I can get those [US] dollars

if it's 2000 Lebanese pounds to the dollar, now, I want to lock in that loss rather than worry or take the risk of a loss of greater debasement of the value of the Lebanese pound in months to come.