Arabic original title: أين هو حاكم مصرف لبنان؟ وأين الولايات المتحدة؟
Original publication: Al Joumhouria Newspaper
Publication date: February 6, 2026
Original Arabic article: https://www.aljoumhouria.com/ar/news/796321/
This article examines Lebanon’s Central Bank file through the intersection of monetary governance, depositors’ rights, parliamentary budgeting, public accountability, and the role of the United States in Lebanon’s financial equation. It argues that the issue is not merely technical or banking-related, but part of a wider struggle over responsibility, transparency, sovereignty, and the political management of Lebanon’s financial collapse.
English translation / adapted English version:
Where Is Lebanon’s Central Bank Governor? And Where Is the United States?
On January 9, I published an article titled, “Said Did It and Spoke the Unspeakable: There Is No Financial Gap, but a State Debt Financed with Depositors’ Money.” Everything begins with this statement, and everything must be measured against it, because it is not a sentence to be uttered and then forgotten. It is a standard that exposes an entire vocabulary through which the Lebanese people have been conditioned since October 17, 2019.
A “state debt” was renamed a “financial gap,” using a single term to diffuse responsibility while burying the fact that the state’s debt was financed with depositors’ money. People were then asked to treat the crime as a financial destiny rather than the result of political and financial decisions, thereby obscuring responsibility. I believed that the greatest danger in Lebanon arises when language becomes a tool for absolving the debtor and exhausting the victim, while implanting a single idea in the public consciousness: that what has been lost is gone forever and that people must learn to accept their losses before they are even allowed to examine their cause.
I write today because the test has now emerged, not merely as another passing news item, but through a revealing convergence of events. The February 4 deadline set by Karim Said for commercial banks to provide Banque du Liban with a package of information has expired, while Parliament was simultaneously holding sessions to approve the national budget. At that moment, the statement made on January 9 should have become a daily standard that could not be allowed to fade.
The central issue, which should have been pursued without interruption, was for the media to seize upon the governor’s statement as the backbone of its coverage and carry it directly into the place where the deception was unfolding live on air. In Parliament, the term “financial gap” returned repeatedly to the speeches of MPs, while the government slipped into the same language as though it were a neutral fact. Television channels broadcast the sessions live, allowing people to witness how they were being retrained to accept the old vocabulary.
The media should have been on full alert, breaking this conditioning as it occurred by repeatedly reminding the public that a statement had been made by the country’s highest monetary authority. That statement identified the debtor and restored the right to its rightful owners: “A state debt financed with depositors’ money.”
What was being said in Parliament through the language of the financial gap was not an innocent description, but a reconstruction of an old narrative in a new form. The media’s silence therefore represents a failure of the test, an act of complicity and an alignment with Economic Narrative Warfare, as we understand it within the vocabulary of the Trumponomics Doctrine. Anyone who refrains from protecting the statement contributes to burying its true meaning, even while claiming merely to report the news.
At this point, we must ask: Where is the United States in all of this?
In a country where the governorship of Banque du Liban is treated as a position that cannot, in practice, be filled without implicit American approval, because the keys to the dollar system, financial compliance and correspondent banking are not located in Beirut, American silence becomes a legitimate question from which there is no escape.
Reuters documented that Washington was present during the process of selecting the governor and evaluated candidates both in Washington and at the US Embassy in Beirut, after which Karim Said was appointed. If Washington enters the evaluation room under the banners of protecting the financial system, ensuring compliance and advancing reform, how can it then leave the scene at the first domestic test, when the term “financial gap” is recycled on air and people are trained to accept it as the only truth?
The opposing statement was already clear and publicly declared: There is a state debt financed with depositors’ money, not a financial gap. It was affirmed by the governor himself, who is the country’s principal monetary authority.
We all know that the United States imposes its conditions and possesses enough instruments of pressure to change the behaviour of entire systems at the political, economic, security and humanitarian levels, as demonstrated in Gaza and Greenland. It also proposes new structures that advance ahead of traditional international institutions, such as the creation of a new Board of Peace.
Why, then, does Washington appear particularly hesitant or silent in Lebanon, when it possesses the capacity to impose the conditions for financial and banking recovery in a country whose system depends fundamentally on the dollar network, compliance standards and correspondent banks?
Because Lebanon’s memory is short, it is worth recalling that American involvement through the financial gateway is not a theoretical proposition. During the Intra Bank crisis of 1966, the event was not merely the collapse of a bank, but the destabilisation of an entire model of trust and liquidity.
An external figure was brought into the practical auditing process to examine the books and assess liquidity and liabilities. The name of Paul Parker appears in this context as a vice president of Bank of America who was brought in “to clean up the mess after the collapse.”
This episode is not mentioned merely as history. It conveys something simple that leaves little room for interpretation. If opening the books and breaking through political and media obfuscation was possible then, why does everything today appear to be managed by elevating the term “financial gap” while burying the statement “a state debt financed with depositors’ money”? Is this not the very definition of diffusing responsibility?
The question remains: Where is the governor after making the statement that overturned the entire vocabulary?
Where is the man who should continue applying pressure so that his words are not buried beneath parliamentary sessions in which the term “financial gap” is repeatedly broadcast? Is the silence tactical because the file is progressing through documents and accounts? Is it the result of containment because the statement embarrassed everyone? Or is it a wager that time will erase the shock and return people once again to the language of the financial gap?
The conclusion therefore returns to the beginning: “There is no financial gap, but a state debt financed with depositors’ money.”
This is the standard that obliges the media to keep the statement alive every day rather than allowing it to fade. It obliges Washington to state its position after having been present during the selection process. And it obliges the governor to transform the statement into a course of action rather than allowing it to remain merely a news item.
Publication reference:
This article appears within Joseph Deeb’s wider Publications section, under Lebanon, Economy & Public Sector Reform, where Lebanon’s financial crisis, state accountability, monetary governance, foreign influence, and institutional reform are examined through economic and political responsibility.
Official doctrine page: The Official Birth of the Trumponomics Doctrine