A signpost to an exchange office in Hamra, Beirut. (Credit: Florient Zwein/Hans Lucas)
BEIRUT — The Lebanese lira further depreciated Tuesday evening, trading at LL40,000 to the dollar on the parallel market.
Since Monday afternoon, its exchange rate with the US dollar fell from LL37,500 — where it had stood for several days — to around LL39,500, earlier Tuesday and hitting LL40,000 Tuesday night.
According to the various websites and online applications, the dollar is currently worth LL40,000 to buy and LL39,900 to sell, which widens the gap between this rate and Banque du Liban's Sayrafa platform rate, which stood at LL30,300 to the dollar as of Tuesday.
The difference between these two rates is currently LL9,700, while officially the dollar remains pegged to the national currency at LL1,507.5.
For several weeks, the authorities have been trying to officially modify this peg, so that the value of the dollar is LL15,000, after having based the calculations for the 2022 budget on this revised rate. This budget was adopted at the end of September, several months behind the constitutional deadline, and should be published in the Official Gazette soon, thus making it official.
While the government had announced that the application of this new official rate would be applied from Nov. 1, in an attempt to gradually unify the multiple exchange rates in Lebanon, Lebanese officials are now going back and forth on the implementation of this decision. According to an unnamed source at the Ministry of Finance quoted by Reuters, the project is at least temporarily buried due to "political disagreements." The same source added that "no one in the country wanted to bear the responsibility" of this decision, which would have important consequences on the economy and its tax regime. Lebanon has been grappling with a serious financial crisis since 2019.