No time to cry wolf

In the Lebanese banking sector’s cherished game of claiming the deposit throne, month-on-month drops of private sector deposits are usually reserved for the January statistics, in what has become known as the annual correction of window dressing at the end of the business year. That is why, when the relevant central bank data is pulled up as a line graph, January 2011, January 2014, and January 2015 look like little potholes on a long, ever ascending highway to a heaven of private sector deposits. Besides the January corrections, deposit dips in the past five years have been few and far between, such as February 2011, July 2012 and April 2013. None of downward moves lasted more than a month and none amounted to more than a few decimals in the sector’s deposit tally of billions of dollars. This fact alone was enough to make alarm signals sound in the news,