What's next for the Lebanese banking sector?

Who remembers a banker or politician beaming proudly about the banking sector’s $170 billion in deposits? The Lira is safe, they would continue without skipping a beat, because the size of our deposits is 3 times GDP. This is like me borrowing $3 million from someone and going around town bragging that I’m a multi-millionaire. Deposits are liabilities, i.e. debt, owed by the banks to you, the depositor. Banks and people forgot this simple principle, which is why we are where we are today. The banking sector and the central bank in Lebanon have presided over the biggest artificial creation of money and wealth in the history of the nation, which I wrote about here Effectively, they did something that nobody’s ever done before — they printed US dollars. If this had happened in physical form, special agents from the US Secret Service, wearing Oakley sunglasses, would have been dispatched to Beirut to investigate ... except it was all perfectly (or imperfectly) legal.This also makes the current unwinding that we’re currently witnessing, the biggest destruction of wealth in the history of the country. We were featured in the Guinness Book of Records in 1976 for the biggest bank heist in history, the British Bank of the Middle East (HSBC today). The armed bandits, thought to be PLO, made out with around $125 million in today’s dollars, and, except for the largest Hummos plate, we haven’t graced its pages for anything significant since. We will soon have the dubious honor of being featured again, for the biggest bank heist in...