This is not a post to defend banks in Lebanon or undermine their role in the monetary and economic crisis, nor a post to criticize protesters and what the revolution has achieved so far. There were numerous righteous movements against the central bank and inside and outside several banks, but what has happened in the last week or so of attacks against bank employees and storming and occupying branches is useless and will backfire big…

No one still knows how Carlos Ghosn managed to slip past the cameras set at his house, past the police and border control in Japan and Turkey all the way to Beirut. The sure thing is that this is a huge embarrassment to the Japanese authorities, who are fuming at his "cowardly act" as they're calling it. Ghosn was under house arrest, had turned over his passports to his lawyer as ordered by the court…

New reports are emerging on which country has the largest gold reserves in the world, with Lebanon ranked 20th worldwide with 286.84 tons of gold and second largest in the Middle East. This is not surprising as there were plenty of similar reports in the past years, but I am not sure how useful all these reserves are when the economy is at the brink of collapse. We have very high physical gold reserves relative…