Reading Time: 8 minutes Lebanon is due to make a $1.2 billion principal eurobond payment on March 9, with opinion divided on whether to pay or put in place a plan to restructure the debt. As part of our coverage, Executive spoke via telephone with Nassib Ghobril, chief economist of the Byblos Bank Group, to find out why he…
Q&A with Nassib Ghobril on Lebanon’s eurobonds
The case for Lebanon restructuring its debt
Reading Time: 3 minutes Lebanon’s economic vulnerabilities are on full display. Investors and other stakeholders have lost confidence in the Lebanese financial system, triggering an existential economic crisis. In short, Lebanon’s future is jeopardized by three intertwined crises of sustainability with regard to the public debt, the current account deficit, and the financial sector. As such, resolving Lebanon’s crisis…
In pictures: Protests against the new government
Reading Time: < 1 minute On Tuesday, February 11, Downtown Beirut saw clashes between security forces and hundreds of protesters who had gathered to block access to Parliament ahead of a vote of confidence on the new government. Several rounds of clashes between protesters and police resulted in the injuries of 373 people, 45 of whom were taken to hospital…
In pictures: Day 101 of the uprising
Reading Time: < 1 minute On Saturday January 25, protesters came back out in the hundreds to mark over 100 days of the Lebanese uprising, with marches held throughout the city congregating in Downtown Beirut. As the day wore on, as had been the case in previous weekends in January, the evening was characterized by clashes between riot police and…
Those responsible for attacks on the press must be held accountable
Reading Time: 3 minutes Journalists were among the most active in documenting the Lebanese protests, according to our Lebanon Protests open-data platform. This role has put members of the press at risk, with attacks on media spiking in mid-January—the SKeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom identified over 20 violations against media between January 14 – 20, raising the…
Going virtual to survive Lebanon’s financial crisis
Reading Time: 3 minutes IN BRIEF The virtual working model benefits employers and employees. It has the potential to foster decentralized economic growth. It can be a shield for businesses in times of crisis. The political crisis in Lebanon has compounded an economic crisis that has been looming in the shadows for decades. News of business closures, salary reductions,…
How Lebanese entrepreneurs can survive the liquidity crisis
Reading Time: 5 minutes IN BRIEF The liquidity crisis requires immediate attention and will likely result in an IMF program, with consequences for poorer Lebanese. In the short term, an IMF-backed loan program would need to create a specialized fund to promote the local private sector and entrepreneurship. In the long term, the government needs to foster relationships between…
The resilient brain
Reading Time: 4 minutes IN BRIEF Resilience can be learned and developed. The brain adopts different strategies to cope with stress. There are ways to improve individual resilience during political violence. Resilience, or the capacity to recover quickly from difficult situations is not a trait that is unique only to some. In fact, resilience—defined by Professor of Developmental Psychopathology…
An investigation into the revenues from Lebanon’s seismic data
Reading Time: 3 minutes One of the major obstacles that post-war Lebanon has faced is the absence of adequate transparency tools that, if there, would have lead to greater public accountability. Access to information has been limited, and mandatory disclosure mechanisms are verging on nonexistent. Such limitations have encouraged many forms of corruption. Despite the fact that the past…
Analytical approaches to economic rescue plans for Lebanon
Reading Time: 7 minutes Lebanon’s political economy today is in a situation where risks are existential and inaction opens the gates to disaster, but potential payoffs are highly skewed to the upside—if successful. This suggests that the newly eager-for-action behaviors in the political class—which appear in many ways counter intuitive to previous decision-making patterns here—convey at least a modicum…
Experts tackle Lebanon’s dilemmas with a plethora of rescue plans
Reading Time: 13 minutes IN BRIEF The implications of Lebanon’s current fiscal crisis are grave, but not fated to be devastating. Economic rescue plans circulating remain in the pro-private and neo-liberal economic modes of thought. As a result, there is a reassuring amount of overlap but little efforts to explore solutions outside these paradigms. At the beginning of 2020,…
Reflections on the Lebanese revolution
Reading Time: 3 minutes When crowds began to gather in Downtown Beirut on that fateful evening on October 17, 2019, few could have predicted that, a 100 plus days later, Lebanon would be still in the furrows of a revolt with almost daily protests across the nation, several clashes between protesters and party shabiha, and with riot police—and road…
Lebanon’s new government must focus on priorities
Reading Time: 3 minutes Lebanon has a new Council of Ministers. This is, from one perspective, a clear and present improvement. Having a government as a sovereign state is an absolute and total prerequisite to function as a country in the global concert of nations. In this sense, the serial failures of Lebanon to swiftly move and empower new…
Look to the people
Reading Time: 2 minutes If anything is bankrupt in this country, it is the establishment. Their incompetence is so vulgar and obvious that there is nothing they could do to convince us otherwise. The verdict is out, they know it, everyone knows it—locally, regionally, and internationally. We are all watching them clinging to the power they still think they…
People outclass politicians on women’s rights, expression rights, and responsibilities
Reading Time: 9 minutes The fourth discussion in Executive’s roundtable initiative was comprised of two broad topics: access to rights, with particular focus on the rights of women, and access to information, with additional focus on freedom of expression and media responsibility. Both topics were deserving of roundtables in their own right and had initially been planned as separate…