The lebanese pound is in free fall from the beginning of a grave economic crisis in the country at the end of 2019. The currency crossed the barrier of 100,000 units for one dollar on the black market, a new historical record.
A US bill costs this morningon the street 100,000 Lebanese poundswhile each dollar is sold slightly below that mark, at 99,500 units, according to the local currency monitoring website “Lirarate.org”, commonly used as a reference, according to the Efe agency.
The Lebanese currency has lost about 100% of its value since the start of the crisis more than three years ago and has been in continuous decline at an unprecedented pace since last December, when its value on the parallel market was around 40,000 to one dollar.
The Central Bank of Lebanon fails in its attempts
In these months, the rapid decline has been halted or briefly reversed after a couple of Lebanese Central Bank Announcements, but in a matter of a week or two it returned to its previous trend and continues to plummet, with expectations that it will soon reach 110,000 units per dollar. Faced with this situation, commercial transactions begin to rapidly become dollarized in different sectors.
On February 1, the Central Bank applied, on the other hand, a 895% increase in the exchange rate official local currency, which went from 1,507 units per dollar to 15,000 per US bill, in the first increase announced by the issuing entity in more than three decades.
However, it is the exchange rate in the parallel market that determines the prices of almost everything in the nation of cedars and the official one has very few uses, due to the enormous gap created between the two since the crisis began in 2019. , when the two were even.
