Leon on Everything

In Lebanon, our private school system is usually dominated by one language: French. We learn French in kindergarten and from the very first grade all throughout the school years. In it, we learn the sciences, mathematics, history and pretty much every school subject. Arabic is also taught but relegated to Arabic literature, Arab history, and geography courses. French literature has the same grade weight as Arabic on the report card. Some people even use French to speak to their young children, who in turn pick up the language earlier than the rest (the same people also use it with to talk to pets, but that’s another topic). Now other schools use English instead of French for the same reason, they are more of a special case, and I won’t mention them here further here. At some point in the academic course, a third language makes an appearance. The world most indispensable language: English. It is taught later in the academic course, and its role and its grade weight are small in th...

When working people start accumulating money, they need to invest it somewhere. European and North American banks no longer pay reasonable interest rates for current accounts and even deposit accounts. The Chinese stock market bubble burst has dominated the business news this summer (summer of 2015). It went down some 40 percent in less than 3 months. With the frequency of such bubble bursts, the average person can be forgiven for thinking that investing in equities is too risky. And so a lot of people end up investing in real estate. The conventional thinking goes that although real estate bubbles exist - as evidenced by the latest crash in 2007- real estate values will never go down to zero. Or if they can’t afford it then they invest into interest bank accounts (where they still exist) The Lehman Brothers crash has been on the minds of a lot of investors in recent years. There were indeed several fortunes that got wiped out when that bank went bankrupt. Some people thought th...

With the success of the free market system in China and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has reached consensus over the best economic system. Capitalism is now the standard way of organizing most economies around the world. Along with its wide adoption, came the creed that capitalism creates prosperity and raises people out of poverty. This seems true more than ever in the 21st century developing nations. In China, for example, more people have risen from poverty and a middle class has been created. Prosperity has always been the promise of capitalism in western nations. In America, in particular, the Baby Boom generation grew up in a world where one’s labor allowed her to access a middle-class standard of living providing for herself and her children. However, in the 21st century Western World and while China was rising under the eyes of everyone, a new reality started to set in. This fact has been brewing since the end of the miracle 1990s decade but has been primari...