Word: bank
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Beirut is the world's newest and fastest-rising financial center. In the last decade it has expanded its banking business by 1,000% - and it shows no signs of slowing. Climbing above its clangorous, double-parked streets are more than 100 banks, including 41 foreign branches and offices as diverse as Moscow's Narodny Bank and the Bank of America. Since July, Manhattan's Morgan Guaranty and Irving Trust have both leased offices in Beirut. The First National Banks of Boston and Chicago are negotiating to open outlets, and another 13 banks have recently been incorporated...
...rigid that any loose-tongued banker can be jailed for two years. Beirut's safety has also impressed some of the usually suspicious sheiks of the Persian Gulf. Sheik Shakhbut of Abu Dhabi, who earns $1,000,000 a week from his oil, insisted on burying his bank notes in his mud-brick palace-until silverfish began drilling through the bundles...
...levels of a highly mobile society in which poor men get rich quick but seldom vice versa. Though they primarily serve the Moslem world, most are Christians. The giant among them, Yusuf Bedas, 51, began as a moneychanger operating out of two small rooms in 1948; now his Intra Bank has assets of more than $1 billion and branches from New York to Nigeria. He is building another branch on Paris' Champs Elysées, last week bought a four-story Rome palazzo that will become Italy's first Lebanese bank, and early next year will move into...
Many Beirut bankers start with useful political capital. Pierre Edde, for example, went into banking after four terms as Lebanon's Finance Minister. Others made fortunes overseas and then invested in banking-notably Toufic Assaf, chairman of the Bank of Beirut and The Arab Countries, who earned millions from a wholesale business in Venezuela, and Joseph Saab, who built a bundle in South Asian mining and exporting. Saab's Development Bank has introduced modern banking to Lebanon's peasant villages, opened 35 branches in the past three years. Says he: "In even the smallest village, farmers need...
...that try the most patient bankers. One sheik withdrew $6,000,000 overnight because his banker could not procure a belly dancer he had admired. And Kuwait's skeptical Sheik Abdullah al Mubarak, who stored $25 million in cash and suitcases full of stocks at Yusuf Bedas' bank, once ordered that his stocks be delivered instantly to his mountain mansion; he carefully counted them one by one, then airily waved them back to the bank. But when he tried to tell Bedas how to run his business, the banker exploded: "Take your money and get out." Few bankers...