Sri Lanka’s crippling debt crisis
What’s happening?
A full-scale economic collapse and political crisis, with every chance of further violent unrest. Last week the parliamentary speaker warned of an imminent hunger crisis. This week the “new” prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe – a septuagenarian on his fifth stint as PM since the 1990s – warned that the country had run out of petrol, and that it desperately needed $75m of foreign currency to pay for essential imports to avoid social collapse. For months, the government of president Gotabaya Rajapaksa has been struggling to cope with an inflationary spiral and a lack of
