The madness of clowning around in an economic tornado

ENAR

Two months after a blundering collage of new budgetary revenue measures drove people into a unified and spontaneous civil uprising, the state of Lebanon remains an unresolved mess. Six weeks of attempts by the political regime to uphold and reorganize what the people perceived as a corrupt system only made the country’s social and economic predicaments more intractable. Failures of the process to determine a cabinet in the first week of December then further exacerbated questions if the stakeholders in the old regime have understood the popular will and demand for a new independence of Lebanon from its soiled political past and the seriousness of the country’s economic disaster and looming financial implosion. From a banking and finance perspective, the dire monetary state of Lebanon in the final weeks of 2019 is neither the fruit of the populace’s political struggle for a redesign of the country’s electoral and representative paradigms