Reading Time: 6 minutes In the context of Lebanon’s existential crisis, Executive inquired about the country’s new economic and social barriers – a mountain of problems formed around a nexus of ginormous poverty, towering unemployment, and a colossal need for investment that appears impossible to scale. In seeking to chart new financial and economic pathways, Executive sat down with…
Q&A with economist Freddie Baz on Lebanon’s economic survival
Reading Time: 20 minutes In discussing Lebanon’s economic survival, some local opinion makers and economists have been making nothing but dire predictions since the fourth quarter of 2019. Executive wanted to take the perspective of Freddie Baz, a Lebanese economist, banker, and citizen who has for over two decades been a regular interlocutor of this magazine on banking and…
Questions on data, policy design, and usefulness of assumptions
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…
Q&A with Riad Obegi, chairman of Banque BEMO, on banking sector challenges
Reading Time: 7 minutes At a time when banking is materially challenged by economic and financial stresses, and is faced with extreme criticism from distressed depositors and the explosion of economic commentators and activists of all colors in the country, Executive wanted to know what local banking leaders have to say about the quagmire and the way forward. Riad…
Q&A with Fady Gemayel on the impact of the coronavirus crisis on Lebanon’s industry
Reading Time: 5 minutes To gauge the extent to which Lebanese manufacturing industry, an often overlooked but crucial driver of the economy, is being impacted by the current global coronavirus pandemic in conjunction with the previous difficulties in Lebanon, Executive conducted a phone interview with Fady Gemayel, president of the Association of Lebanese Industrialists. How is Lebanese industry coping…
New ABL chair talks adjustments to state budgets and his views on banking
Reading Time: 8 minutes As the banking sector is, for the umpteenth time in the last quarter century, the litmus test for Lebanon’s economic survivability and hopes of prosperity, Executive sat down with Salim Sfeir, chairman and chief executive officer of Bank of Beirut and chairman of the Association of Banks in Lebanon (ABL). E At the time…