Former Labor Minister Charbel Nahas provided some sobering statistics at today’s City Debates conference at AUB.
Chief among them was $170 billion in capital inflows from 1993-2012. Much of it came from little- taxed real estate sales.
That amount is today’s equivalent of the US Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild destroyed European countries such as Germany after World War II. And Lebanon is far from Germany, Nahas argued:
Also, he said land prices have grown by 250 percent over the last five years:
But as the country goes broke and most people can’t afford homes, others are doing better than ever. Banks have over $120 billion worth in deposits.
Who holds that money? Just over 2 percent of the population owns 60 percent of it, according to Nahas’s slides.
And 0.07 percent (or around 250 households) own 20 percent of those deposits:
Would it be simplistic to assume that a lot of that “Marshall Plan” money went into the pockets of a few?
