Uneasy bedfellows

ENAR

Lebanon’s bankers and the government are a close-knit family, and like any family they have a love-hate relationship. In this particular homestead, the kindred glue that binds them together is the colossal national debt. Of late, however, this has started to come unstuck. Banque du Liban (BDL), Lebanon’s central bank, has made efforts that may offer some respite in the short term, but the long-term fix will have to encompass a much more fundamental rearrangement — if, that is, any one is daring to look that far down the line.   From a paltry $1 billion at the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, the state’s debt has skyrocketed to around $58 billion today and the main proprietor of this liability has been the nation’s prodigal sons, the banks. For many years, this relationship served the bankers well by providing them with a safe asset in which to