In their debt

The affinity of Lebanese banks for government Treasury bills and other fixed income securities has always been strong, but the love affair intensified significantly in the early 1990s with the Hariri-inspired Horizon 2000 reconstruction program, which forced the government to resort to domestic and foreign issues of government fixed income securities or bonds to finance the project. Rebuilding the country and the poundBack then the country was in tatters. Not only was there an urgent need to rebuild, but the Lebanese pound, which by the fall of 1992 nearly hit LL3,000 to US dollar, also had to be saved. Rafik Hariri was quick to realize that the only way to obtain fast financing was to resort to debt via the issuance of domestic, Lebanese pound denominated Treasury bills. Loans from international banking institutions or supranational organizations such as the World Bank or the IMF would have been too slow to