Electronics are becoming more disposable. Indeed, built-in obsolescence, high cost of repair, as well as leaps in technology have shortened their lifespan. The Global E-waste Monitor 2017, a study on electronic waste (e-waste) undertaken through a collaboration of the United Nations University, the International Telecommunication Union, and the International Solid Waste Association, found that in…
The dangers of e-waste disposal in Lebanon
VCs call for more updates to regulations and legislation to attract foreign investment
It has been six years since Banque du Liban (BDL), Lebanon’s central bank, announced Circular 331, designed to boost investment in the knowledge economy. Now entrepreneurs seeking seed-stage funding, and those operating VC funds in the country tell Executive that while more capital is available for startups seeking follow-on funding, seed or early stage funding…
Profiles of two facilities management companies in Lebanon
Buildings do not run themselves. Lights must be changed, air conditioner units must be fixed, accounts kept in order, invoices sent, and so on. The list is long and tedious, and, in some cases, outsourced to a facilities management company. Facilities management is not just about lights and air conditioner units, however, it also encompasses…
Lebanon releases the 2019 citizen budget
The 2019 budget law was subject to long debates that left citizens wondering about the ways the budget would affect their lives. It is a daunting task to make sense of the 1,000 plus black and white pages filled with complex tables, numbers, and graphs. To help non-specialists understand the information in the budget law,…
New ABL chair talks adjustments to state budgets and his views on banking
As the banking sector is, for the umpteenth time in the last quarter century, the litmus test for Lebanon’s economic survivability and hopes of prosperity, Executive sat down with Salim Sfeir, chairman and chief executive officer of Bank of Beirut and chairman of the Association of Banks in Lebanon (ABL). E At the time…
Book review: Aftermath, Seven Secrets of Wealth Preservation in the Coming Chaos
American economic writer James Rickards has delivered his fourth book on dystopian economics in a series that started in 2011 with the publication of The Currency Wars. Aftermath, released in July, promises to fortify readers for coming economic and societal chaos with not-so-esoteric economic knowledge of seven secrets of wealth preservation. The author presumes that…
The opportunity of peer-to-peer lending in Lebanon
Through conversations with Lebanese entrepreneurs, business owners, bankers, and politicians, I have had a number of eye-opening discussions into the challenges and opportunities faced by Lebanon’s SME ecosystem. Given the country’s long-standing tradition in financial services and its large banking sector, I believe fintech—with solutions such as peer-to-peer lending, machine learning to personalize insurance solutions,…
Currencies, bonds, gold, and emerging assets
The mundane reality of human wealth advisories is keeping investors in the purgatories of risk. Thus, it seems proper for the investor to track the evolutions of asset classes in a world where comprehensive wealth narratives begin with traditional asset classes—gold, bonds, and cash—and also venture into non-traditional stories of investing in infrastructure, entrepreneurship, and…
Questioning Lebanese real estate as an investment proposition
In the beginning, the land was empty and without borders, but then came people who settled on the land and built upon it. The people divided the land into plots large and small and invented rights of ownership to the land, all that was built on it, the water and resources beneath it, and the…
Reinvention of Lebanese equities and the coming capital market
Metaphorically, the asset class of equities, based on trading claims of minuscule ownership slices in listed enterprises, is the ballroom dance queen and king in the palace of financial markets. Historically—the joint stock company that is the precondition for the trading of shares being as young as four centuries—this asset class is a spring chicken…
Asset management in Lebanon
The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. The problem of Lebanon in the current period of economic scarcity and political austerity is the proper administration of wealth in the interest of empowering society to…
Lebanese investors must stay alert to opportunities
In today’s Lebanon there are two biases. Let us call them the phoenix bias and the shithole bias. The first is the narrative of an indestructible culture, a country and haven of wealth that has never defaulted on its financial obligations and where no depositor of wealth has to fear the disappearance of a single…
Lebanon needs a long-term solution to its trash woes
Lebanon on the precipice of another trash crisis, with its own garbage floating in the sea, lining the streets, and forming a mountain in Tripoli. All this not even five years after the last crisis that, in 2015, saw mounds of garbage pile up on the streets of Beirut and Mount Lebanon. In the north,…
A plane in the sky
You can no longer live in denial, just clicking on what interests you in this fake voyeur world. Stop looking the other way, reality is now upon us. Swiping left is no longer an option. The drums of war have been resonating closer and stronger from the Persian Gulf, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria adding to…
Updated laws on e-transactions, offshore companies, and code of commerce
Pressure to update the seven-decades-old Lebanese code of commerce was threefold. First, pressure to reform followed the decision of Banque du Liban (BDL), Lebanon’s central bank, to issue Circular 331 in 2013 to encourage investment in the startup ecosystem, as startups by definition entail innovative technology and development language that is foreign to rigid and…