Robin Wigglesworth

speaker

1,983 appearances 13 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 Aug

Robin Wigglesworth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

Appearances

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The Story of Money · The financial scams that brought Albania to the brink of war · 17 Jun 2026 podcast

Yeah, I mean it does sound that way. voice-verified

You have this massively sclerotic, kind of not quite Soviet era, because they'd kind of distanced themselves even from that uh banking system uh that you know riddle with probably bad loans to cronies of the administration that couldn't really do anything. voice-verified

I think even the technology was so bad they couldn't really send money. voice-verified

Uh so you had to wait for weeks. voice-verified

So people started to kind of set up their own little uh bank. voice-verified

As it were, in kind of very much inverted commas, but why were the authorities okay with this? voice-verified

I mean, I I read the IMF report. voice-verified

The IMF did this incredible post-mortem afterwards. voice-verified

Uh that's really worth reading. voice-verified

But even the IMF admits that, look, we kind of thought this was a good thing. voice-verified

Why was that? voice-verified

No, I mean I can imagine in in the IMF's almost defense that you know this was not a high priority in the World Bank of the IMF in the early nineties, given everything else that was going on in the world, right? voice-verified

Absolutely. voice-verified

And I guess it kind of does make sense that these businesses uh evolve into pseudo-banks. voice-verified

But some of them were I mean, there were businesses, but they were illegal businesses. voice-verified

There were smuggling businesses that became voice-verified

Aim banks. voice-verified

I guess also it's the revealed preference that people need banks and banking services. voice-verified

I mean, the IMF report again, when it tries to kind of explain away why it turned a blind eye to this, they said, well, the state banks were crap, basically non-functional. voice-verified

And these things, if you squinted at them and ignore the fact they happened in a completely unregulated way, did operate like banks. voice-verified

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