E Economist Marwan Iskandar recently said that it is not realistic to think that Lebanon has not been affected by the global financial crisis, especially considering the public debt; what’s your take on this? Our customer deposits represented almost 90 percent of our funding base. Boring banking, boring banks. Lack of sophistication based in commercial banking is why Lebanese banks have been insulated from the crisis. What Iskandar is saying is true in marginal terms, not absolute terms. The International Monetary Fund has forecasted real gross domestic product growth for 2009 between 3 and 4 percent. Global GDP will witness a negative growth of negative 1.5 percent. This drop in our growth rates translates into some of the burdens felt by the global financial crisis, but it’s a mix of positive and negative contributions, with a net contribution still positive, but at 3 percent, not at 8.5 percent. At this
