BDL plays government

Banque du Liban (BDL), Lebanon’s central bank, makes a curious claim on its website. Under “Monetary Overview” in the “About Us” section, the bank says that, beginning in 2013, it “resorted to unconventional monetary policy tools to stimulate internal demand and sustain the country’s growth and job creation potential.” Here the bank is referring to stimulus packages that have pumped millions of dollars into the economy over the past three years. What’s curious is the bank’s definition of its actions as “monetary policy” ‒ which the stimulus packages are decidedly not. In the absence of real governance and policy making in recent years (the only two laws Parliament passed in 2013 postponed parliamentary elections and extended lawmakers’ terms), the bank has stepped in to help spur economic growth. A stimulus package is economic policy, not monetary. Alain Bifani, director general of the Ministry of Finance who sits on the board