The Crisis In Lebanon

A Historical Economic Collapse

IN THE NEWS:

This week we saw glimpses of Beirut, Lebanon, on our TV and device screens, heralding sectarian violence that led to six fatalities. See, e.g., NYTimes. The last time images of Lebanon demanded our collective attention was more than a year ago, during the immediate aftermath of the devastating port explosion there.

Despite Lebanon’s absence from popular news, this Mediterranean country has experienced cataclysmic transformations and is now in a state of utter calamity! According to the Wall Street Journal, Lebanon is experiencing an economic meltdown that could be ranked among the top three in the world in the past 150 years! As the New York Times reported just a few days ago, for a while Lebanon lost all electricity this past weekend. And earlier this week, Al Jazeera news ran an article with the following ominous headline: “‘unprecedented’ hunger in Lebanon as fuel crisis hikes food costs.”

As Professor Ussma Makdisi explained in our podcast conversation with him, inflation is skyrocketing and the Lebanese people have lost all their savings in Lebanon’s banks. To boot, Lebanon’s Central Bank has been running a Ponzi scheme for years now! As he tells it, Lebanon lacks a functioning government and its people are deprived of even the most basic services that facilitate the…