Reading Time: 3 minutes Through conversations with Lebanese entrepreneurs, business owners, bankers, and politicians, I have had a number of eye-opening discussions into the challenges and opportunities faced by Lebanon’s SME ecosystem. Given the country’s long-standing tradition in financial services and its large banking sector, I believe fintech—with solutions such as peer-to-peer lending, machine learning to personalize insurance solutions,…
Currencies, bonds, gold, and emerging assets
Reading Time: 9 minutes The mundane reality of human wealth advisories is keeping investors in the purgatories of risk. Thus, it seems proper for the investor to track the evolutions of asset classes in a world where comprehensive wealth narratives begin with traditional asset classes—gold, bonds, and cash—and also venture into non-traditional stories of investing in infrastructure, entrepreneurship, and…
Questioning Lebanese real estate as an investment proposition
Reading Time: 10 minutes In the beginning, the land was empty and without borders, but then came people who settled on the land and built upon it. The people divided the land into plots large and small and invented rights of ownership to the land, all that was built on it, the water and resources beneath it, and the…
Reinvention of Lebanese equities and the coming capital market
Reading Time: 10 minutes Metaphorically, the asset class of equities, based on trading claims of minuscule ownership slices in listed enterprises, is the ballroom dance queen and king in the palace of financial markets. Historically—the joint stock company that is the precondition for the trading of shares being as young as four centuries—this asset class is a spring chicken…
Asset management in Lebanon
Reading Time: 7 minutes The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. The problem of Lebanon in the current period of economic scarcity and political austerity is the proper administration of wealth in the interest of empowering society to…
Financial literacy initiatives for everyday
Reading Time: 4 minutes When it comes to maximizing money, the rich have access to many more resources than anyone else, not to mention the disposable cash to play with in the first place. That doesn’t mean that they are financially literate by birth but they usually grow up in a very favorable family environment for acquiring financial literacy,…
National poverty targeting and employment programs
Reading Time: 7 minutes The conquest of poverty is a core target of the World Bank. Even as it often is viewed—or maligned—as an instrument of capitalism and capitalist interests, the World Bank’s focus on poverty alleviation and on achieving the United Nations’ sustainable development goals means that the multilateral institution has a strong role to play wherever countries…
Hidden pathways to wealth for the Lebanese middle class
Reading Time: 11 minutes Certain roads to wealth for the middle class are less traveled in some lands but well known in others. Describing life insurance as an obscure path to savings would honestly be preposterous in most developed economies. Accounting for $2.7 trillion in premiums, or about 3.5 percent of global GDP, life insurance represents well over half…
Keeping lebanese wealth alive
Reading Time: 9 minutes The quest of trying to depict the 2018 outlook on investment opportunities from the Lebanese corner reminds in some respects of the almost 20-year old hit comedy on the American mob, Analyze This. As with the Robert de Niro and Billy Crystal pic, any move of international financial markets and any development on the political…
Curses of poverty and affluence and the search for financial cures
Reading Time: 10 minutes Many believe that there is no such thing as too much money. At a closer look, however, the extreme abundance or absence of wealth both appear to be prime causes of anguish, albeit in incomparable proportions. Even moderate and temporary cases of poverty lead to all manner of problems, from stress and sleeplessness to ulcers…
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