Reading Time: 11 minutes Economic man is a curious construct. Once thought to be a being superior to the common human in his pursuit of value creation and profit generation, the image of this specialized imaginary human subspecies has fundamentally changed. In fact, economic man has reached a point where some contemporary economists describe this model as emotionally dysfunctional—proposing…
Banking economists on the Lebanese banking sector
Reading Time: 14 minutes Bankers are people. Brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, spouses, children, cousins, clients, business advisors, financial partners, and friends of other Lebanese people. Given that over 25,000 individuals are employed in the local banking sector, with high percentages of them being women (in comparison to most not “traditionally female” professions) in a banking workforce that is composed…
The Lebanese banking sector, a long view
Reading Time: 10 minutes Lebanon’s geographic location and trading history dictate the need for three basic premises in terms of its Economic Policy: a strong and stable currency, advantageous trading facilities and low taxes. Michel Chiha Once there was a time when a Lebanese banker had a national vision. Whether a contemporary citizen agrees with this vision or not…
The madness of clowning around in an economic tornado
Reading Time: 8 minutes 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…
Analysis of banking sector results
Reading Time: 5 minutes The profitability of alpha banks – those with deposits above $2 billion – has grown in the third quarter of 2016 when measured by the improved return on average equity (ROAE). The ROAE ratio at end of September was almost two percentage points higher than a year earlier. This insight from quarterly figures released after…