beezer wroteWell, that's a big part of it isn't it. You go to the exchange, give them dollars, they sell them to people who then get them out of the country instead of keeping it here. This is why banks are limiting these transactions, so things don't get worse. I still believe if people didn't use those exchanges things would stabilize and go back to normal or close to it (in the 1500's) but if we keep giving them dollars and them giving them out to people leaving, we're digging ourselves in.
I remember in Canada I was only allowed to exchange money at the casino or at the border/duty free. Maybe Lebanon should implement something like that, or we switch to dollars once and for all lol.
Well, according to the ILO, an estimated number of 300,000 Syrian workers were located in Lebanon before the outbreak of the Syrian crisis. So you can imagine the number after the outbreak.
If you do the math, and assume that 90% of them are getting paid in LBP the minimum wage of 500,000 LBP, which is an approximation, that's roughly 150 billion of LBP a month or 100 million dollars ( 1500 LBP / usd ) and a 1.2 Billion dollar a year.
We're still assuming that the number of workers is 300,000 ( which IMO is much higher) and taking into consideration the minimum wage.
I did not take into consideration the SYP coming from Syria that is being converted to USD and sent back. This alone is very detrimental to the economy, liquidity and the stability of the LBP exchange rate.
We're talking here about more than 4 Billion dollars per year that's being transferred outside the country to Syria alone. And no, I'm not exaggerating.