Tag Archives | finance

The Only Video You Need To Watch To Understand The Current Crisis

Back in July when the parliament was discussing the budget for the year 2019, not a lot of people probably focused much on the lawmakers’ speeches since most of them actually criticized it, but we were all amused by what MP Salim Saade had to say about falsifying our deficit in order to get the CEDRE funds “They [CEDRE donors] know that we are lying to them, and we know that they know that we are lying to them!”.

However, his joke was in fact a very small part of a thorough explanation for everything that has led to the economic and financial crisis that we are currently going through. Back in July, that economist had a very clear idea of where Lebanon was heading to, while other MPs and ministers were either not listening or making sarcastic comments instead of asking him to elaborate his claims further, they literally seemed uncocerned and it clearly shows in the below video which I highly recommend you watch. It is 24 minutes long and will explain to your the real reasons for the current state we are in now.

If you are interested in following similar experts who say things as they about our situation, then I recommend you check Nassim Taleb and Dan Azzi on twitter. (The latter regularly publishes interesting articles in Annahar and Al-Akhbar newspapers)

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Some fact checking never hurts

mcdonalds-big-mac-meal

Some news editor at elnashra.com must have stumbled upon this old satire article about human meat that has been found in one of McDonald’s meat factories in Oklahoma and decided to make a story out of it!

elnashra-mcdonalds

This isn’t the first time a Lebanese news outlet mistakes satirical news for real, but I can’t believe editors still do this with Google being one click away from them. A simple search reveals that this story actually first originated from the fake news website Huzlers.com and then started making rounds on social media websites.

Some fact and source checking never hurt!

On a side note, my favorite burger at McDonald’s has been the “Big Tasty” for a while now!

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Instabeat and Wally mentioned on Forbes

General Views Of Dubai

Forbes recently posted about 10 Middle Eastern startups that will (hopefully) change lives in the MENA region and the world. Two of these startups are Instabeat, which was founded by Lebanese Hind Hobeika, and Wally, which has two Lebanese members on board of its team, Makram Saleh and Maya Zankoul.

You can check the full list here. If it were up to me, I would have also added eTobb.com.

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The ridiculous increase

The General Labor Confederation (GLC) suspended Wednesday’s planned strike after the Cabinet agreed late Tuesday night to increase the minimum wage to LL700,00 ($466) from the current LL500,000. The government also agreed to increase by LL200,00 the wages of those earning less than LLl million, and by LL300,00 those who earn between LL1 million and LL1.8 million. The agreement also included raising the daily transportation allowance to LL10,000 from LL8,000 while the education allowance for children jumped to a maximum of LL1.5 million.

I’m no economics or finance expert, but I’m gonna go ahead and call this increase ridiculous.

Following which logic did our ministers conclude that people of inferior income should get a smaller increase?! And how is this going to minimize the gap between social classes?

Not to mention that if you earn 1,900,000L.L while your colleague gets 1,700,000L.L, he/she is entitled to an increase while you are not, and will soon be earning more than you do according to the new agreement! Pretty fair eh?!

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