Guarding a fragile future

It could have been a very boring report. In the big picture of Lebanese banking, the classic performance parameters are rather well behaved this year. Assets of commercial banks stood at $166.5 billion at the end of March according to Banque du Liban (BDL), Lebanon’s central bank — up by $1.68 billion from the end of 2013 and up by 7.1 percent year on year. Private sector deposits, which started 2014 with outflows after an atypically high inflow of more than $3 billion in December, returned to a more regularly paced increase of $840 million in March and ended the first quarter at $136.6 billion. This represented 6.6 percent growth when compared with the end of Q1 2013. When widening the view over the previous 12 months, sector data were not staging any alarming deviations from their long-term growth trajectories either, as proven by the full-year data for 2013. In