People are “Robbing” Banks in Lebanon to Take Their Own Money from Their Own Accounts

People are “Robbing” Banks in Lebanon to Take Their Own Money from Their Own Accounts

Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News


As the world’s financial crisis goes from bad to worse, we are increasingly seeing stories where people cannot access their own money in their own bank accounts.
In July we reported that there were violent bank runs happening in China because depositors were locked out of their own accounts. See:

Chinese Bank Run Turns Violent After Angry Crowd Storms Bank of China Branch Over Frozen Deposits – Are You Prepared for the Financial Crash?

When people can no longer access their own funds from the banking cartel, they get desperate.
A story out of Lebanon today reports how there have been a rash of bank robberies in that country from depositors robbing the bank to get money out of their own accounts. (Full story below.)
If you think that banks freezing their own depositors bank accounts and preventing them from withdrawing their own money would never happen in the United States, think again. It was just earlier this year when Canada locked its citizens out of their own bank accounts during the trucker blockades. See:

After Trudeau Freezes Protesters’ Bank Accounts a Run on Canadian Banks Shuts Down Services

The Globalists control much of what happens in the world through the banks, and their goal is nothing short of total tyranny and absolute power, as they plan to eliminate cash and move to a Central Bank Digital Currency, where every single financial transaction is controlled by them, and where they can enforce social behavior by simply preventing you from accessing your funds.
We are seeing signs of this move to control social and political behavior already, as Visa, Mastercard, and American Express have all recently stated that they will start tracking purchases of guns and ammunition. (Source.)
And with the recent targeting of Trump supporters who are all being branded as “White Supremacists,” how long do you think it will be before they start freezing their bank accounts, if that is not happening already?



And it is not just Trump supporters who are being targeted.
On the anniversary of 9/11 this past weekend, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief Alejandro Mayorkas stated that the greatest threat to America today is not foreign terrorists, but American citizens and “domestic terrorism,” which he defined as Americans “radicalized” by an “ideology of hate,” “anti-government sentiment” and “false narratives propagated on online platforms.” (Source.)
Last year the DHS raised the National Terrorism threat alert to include those who opposed COVID measures as “domestic terrorists.”
So the “legal” framework is in place for the U.S. Government to freeze bank accounts of those they decide to label as “domestic terrorists,” which is about half the population.

People are ‘robbing’ banks in Lebanon – to take their own money

The glass facade of a bank in the Lebanese capital Beirut is broken, after a woman stormed it demanding access to her sister’s deposits to allegedly pay for her hospital fees, on September 14, 2022 [Anwar Amro/AFP]
by Al Jazeera

Bank heists in Lebanon have become a growing trend – but these armed “robbers” storming into banks are not stealing anyone else’s money. They are just demanding access to their own savings.
And instead of being prosecuted, the perpetrators have largely been allowed to remain free and have become folk heroes.
The incidents have become increasingly common as Lebanon’s economic crisis continues. The local currency, the Lebanese pound, has depreciated by more than 90 percent against the United States dollar on the black market, while the government’s restrictions on how much money people can withdraw from their own bank accounts have also exacerbated the situation.

So what is behind these bank heists?

• Lebanon has been reeling from a worsening economic meltdown since 2019, plunging 80 percent of its population – about three million people – below the poverty line, according to the United Nations.
  
• Poverty and unemployment have soared, and savings-account values have evaporated, along with the country’s middle class.
  
• Since 2019, Lebanese banks gradually imposed draconian controls on deposits, effectively locking millions of customers out of their foreign currency savings.
  
• “Every time you want to withdraw money, it would be at a rate much lower than the market value,” said Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr. “For example, if you want to withdraw $700, they gave you $200. So that’s a de facto haircut.”
  
• A haircut in economic terms means a reduction applied to the value of an asset. In this case, it refers to the banks’ absurdly unfavourable exchange rate in Lebanese pound when people try to withdraw cash.
  

https://youtu.be/frPH-2hCXOE

How many ‘bank robberies’ have there been so far?

• The first-known case of someone forcibly getting their funds back was reported in January when a man held dozens of people hostage in eastern Lebanon after he was told he could not withdraw his foreign currency savings.
  
• Local media reported that the customer was eventually given some of his savings and surrendered to security forces.
  
• In August, an armed man also held employees and customers hostage at a Beirut bank after he was told he could not withdraw $200,000 from his account for his sick father’s treatment. The man was cheered on by a crowd outside the bank.
  
• On Wednesday, another armed man entered a branch of BankMed in Lebanon’s mountain city of Aley and attempted to retrieve his savings.
  
• On the same day, a woman called Sali Hafiz entered a BLOM Bank branch in Beirut with what she later said was a toy gun, along with other activists, in order to retrieve money from her own account to fund hospital treatment for her cancer-stricken sister. She poured gasoline inside the branch and threatened to set it on fire if she did not receive her savings.
  
• She managed to get $13,000 from her deposits, out of a total of $20,000.
  

Are these lone-wolf acts or part of an organised movement?

• Hafiz and the man who held up the bank in Aley are part of a group called Depositors’ Outcry.
  
• Its founder, Alaa Khorchid, said that desperate times have left people with no choice but to “take matters into their own hands”.
  
• “These people worked for decades, but not for the rulers to build palaces while they can’t afford a bottle of medicine,” he said. “There is no government, no economic recovery plan, and little reserves left.”
  

How bad is Lebanon’s economic crisis?

• The government estimates that losses in the lethargic financial sector since the onset of the currency crisis fall somewhere between $68bn and $69bn.
  
• The World Bank has warned that the economic calamity could rank as one of the three most severe the world has seen since the mid-19th century.
  
  

Read the full article at Al Jazeera.

https://vaccineimpact.com/2022/people-are-robbing-banks-in-lebanon-to-take-their-own-money-from-their-own-accounts/
Thanks to: https://vaccineimpact.com