Reading Time: 10 minutes It may be Lebanon’s best bet for a long-term economic future. This underused economic resource has been idling for over 20 years. It is not of fossil origin or other conventional finite resource. Built entirely on the strength of human ingenuity and collaboration, this resource now appears ready for another attempt at making it in…
New ABL chair talks adjustments to state budgets and his views on banking
Reading Time: 8 minutes 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
Reading Time: 3 minutes 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…
Currencies, bonds, gold, and emerging assets
Reading Time: 9 minutes 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
Reading Time: 10 minutes 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
Reading Time: 10 minutes 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
Reading Time: 7 minutes 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 edtech startups carve a place alongside traditional teaching
Reading Time: 9 minutes Lebanese startups focusing on education technology (edtech) have tapped into the idea that as education changes, they have a role to play in preparing the next generation for the 21st century workplace. Educators seeking to prepare children for the jobs of the future, those that rely more on coding, robotics, AI, and programming—and depend less…
The Lebanese educational landscape
Reading Time: 9 minutes Despite large variances in concepts of what constitutes a good education and the curious inconsistency which individuals tend over time to exhibit on the matter, the value of education as a public good is constant throughout history and across societies as diverse as classical Greece, imperial China, and contemporary America. In our global era of…
MEA focused on local Lebanese market
Reading Time: 11 minutes Middle East Airlines (MEA) is one of Lebanon’s indisputable assets in the wide realm of mobility. The flag carrier throughout its 74-year history has reflected the varied economic fortunes, ambitions, and realities of Lebanon. To inquire about MEA’s positioning and strategic outlook today, Executive interviewed Walid Abillama, the airline’s head of commercial strategies and alliances.…