Dormant capital

When it comes to the question of what Lebanese commercial banks should and could do differently in 2015, the short answer is ‘almost everything’. However, as far as what one can realistically expect them to do differently, from the damaging ways they have trodden for more than two decades, the answer is ‘very little’. As vexing as this is, our banking system’s emergence into the modern economic era would depend on an awakening and adoption of new policies by the central bank. For the past 22 years, since embarking on reconstruction in 1992, Lebanon has been relying on a simplistic currency mechanism of fixity. In 1972, the countries of the world replaced the post World War II fixity with a system whereby the currency, as a mirror of the economy, moves under the influence of factors such as domestic interest rates, job creation and employment, balance of trade and fiscal