Alejandro Velasco

Yeah.

I mean, it's in some ways that simple, but the psychology of it is really hard, especially, of course, if you have a country where there's inequality, right?

And then the incentive is to spend not on the long-term industrialization that might generate some stability, but rather on the quick import that can satisfy the immediate needs of X person at any given time, right?

And that...

Translates from anything to medicine, to basic goods, to luxury items like cars or electrodomestics, et cetera, et cetera, right?

And so the availability of cheap dollars in an oil economy in the midst of a boom makes the dependency not on oil, but on imports all the more pronounced.

And that ultimately is the crisis of a petro-state, that the dependence on oil

generates the vast availability of cheap dollars, which then creates an additional dependency on imports, which then when the bust comes, you can no longer buy those imports cheaply and you have nothing domestically to replace it with.

So I left when I was 16.

And as I said, you know, when we started, you know, this will sound very social scientific, but of course, living it was a different story.

You can index, you know, my youth and adolescence in terms of successive dramatic moments of crisis.

I'll just give you three examples.

So, the first one was in...

1989 in February.

You were like 11?

Yes.

And so I was in school.

And this was a Monday.

My mom had dropped my sister and I off at school.

And suddenly parents started coming to school pulling their kids out.