Lebanese bankers met yesterday and served the public an advice that sounded more like a warning, a threat even: You would have to tighten your belts for long years to come.
Now that’s a sound advice, especially since it’s coming from bankers, you would say. You have to give it to them, their words carry weight. But isn’t the warning-cum-advice redundant, and doubly so if you want my opinion?
For one, bankers have been tightening everyone else’s belts for long years past. ‘Everyone else’ that is excluding themselves and the State Treasury. So evidently, if you don’t tighten your belt willingly, they’ll do it for you regardless of how you feel about it.
Another reason why the warning is redundant has to do with the fact that belts are slackening anyway and have to be tightened not in compliance with the bankers’ diktat but to counter gravity pull. If this pull takes effect, trouser-wearers would be sanctionable under the public decency law rather than by bankers.
Why would bankers then issue a redundant warning? IMHO this is a political statement that says: ”We have enough economic clout to cause hardship, so you would better give us the political place we deserve.”
There is a lot of truth in this. Bankers have wide-perimeter belts that are very elastic. Over nearly two decades, these fat cats of the system have sucked in sizeable resources. And the belts .. well. they are key instruments in the accentuation and perpetuation of the grossly uneven distribution of incomes and wealth in the country. How else do you think the country has the highest income per capita in the region (excluding Israel and oil-producing Arab Gulf states) while nearly 40 percent of its households survive below, at, or near the poverty line?
So no matter what you do with your belt, don’t upset your banker.
