A laboratory to study financial challenges

By the strange virtue of its unresolved economic and financial crisis of now four year duration, Lebanon has become an examination room and nation-scale laboratory for analyzing an economic and financial catastrophe. The reasons are plain: this crisis of a small, highly and deeply dollarized country was composed of interconnected financial, economic, social, political, and external shocks and has been playing out at the cusp of a hyper-connected, hyper-(mis)informed, heavily globalized, extremely financialized and increasingly digitized world that cannot but expect to see novel and very hard-to-manage long economic waves and superfast financial cycles.   The people who were involuntarily subjected to this experiment seem to have shown a rebalancing of newly precarious and informal financial safety with equally precarious and massively externally secured social stability. They have done so through their behavior and coping adjustments over the past four years, which, a cynic might note, were not significantly distorted