Jessica Mendoza

What did it look like for everyday Iranians?

The collapse of Ayande Bank made things even worse.

The bank left behind a massive pile of debt that became the responsibility of the Iranian government, which was already strapped for cash.

In December, the government announced that it would be making serious budget cuts.

These proposed austerity measures added up to a $10 billion cut in subsidies.

For many Iranians, this was the last straw.

hundreds of merchants who don't typically join mass protests took to the streets of Tehran.

In an effort to mollify protesters, the government introduced a monthly cash subsidy of 10 million rials per person.

That's the equivalent of about seven US dollars.

Can you talk about the scale of these protests, how they grew in the past few weeks?

And how has the Iranian government responded?

Human rights activists in Iran, a watchdog group, said it confirmed the deaths of more than 2,600 people and more than 18,000 arrests.

Officials in the region have said they'd seen a drop in protest activity recently, and residents reported an eerie quiet after days of violence.

But it's hard to tell exactly what's happening, because the Iran government has imposed a near-total communications blackout.

There's virtually no internet access in the country at all.

For days, President Trump has threatened to take action against Iran if it killed protesters.

On Wednesday, he said that Iran had stopped killing people.

You mentioned several times that a lot of what happened in the last year and what led ultimately to what's going on now and what happened in December, it's a story of what happens when a country is totally isolated, especially financially.

Was this inevitable?

Was there anything the Iranian government could have done to prevent this from happening?