Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Assad’s Cash Problem: Will Syria’s Dwindling Reserves Bring Down the Regime?

http://world.time.com/2012/12/21/assads-cash-problem-will-syrias-dwindling-reserves-bring-down-the-regime/
 
 
Assad’s Cash Problem: Will Syria’s Dwindling Reserves Bring Down the Regime?
 
By Vivienne Walt Dec. 21, 2012
 
A Free Syrian Army fighter offers evening prayers beside a damaged 
poster of Syria’s President Bashar Assad during heavy clashes with 
government forces in Aleppo, Syria, Dec. 8, 2012.
 
With more than 40,000 people killed in Syria’s devastating war, and 
about three million people driven from their homes, Western and Arab 
leaders are grappling with one question: How and when does all this end? 
The answer, say some, might lie not in the horrific bloodshed but in a 
simpler factor: money. Economists say President Bashar Assad’s regime 
has effectively gone broke, and is running out of ways to raise revenues 
and keep most of its soldiers properly fed and paid. “The economy is the 
basis of everything,” says Samir Seifan, a prominent Syrian economist 
who fled last year. He spoke by phone from Dubai. “Without services, 
boots, money, you cannot do anything. If the government cannot finance 
the army, they [soldiers] will simply go away.”
 
That tipping point, in which the government faces all-out financial 
collapse, seems to be drawing near—between three to six months from now, 
according to the calculations of Seifan and others who have examined 
Syria’s finances. Already, Assad has abandoned about 40% of the 
country’s territory to rebel forces, withdrawing his troops from the 
ground while his jets continue aerial bombing, apparently because the 
army is too thinly stretched to defend both rural areas and the 
government-held pockets of Damascus and Syria’s most populous city, 
Aleppo. And while Assad appears still to have considerable resources in 
Damascus, the economic indicators suggest his country is in free-fall, 
and that he has little way to generate fresh cash—at least not without 
appeals to allies.
 
The government’s official foreign reserves have dwindled from about $20 
billion before the conflict erupted in early 2011, to between $2 and $4 
billion now, according to estimates by the Institute of International 
Finance Inc. (IIF), a global banking association in Washington, whose 
members have branches in Damascus. Syrian opposition economists 
calculate Assad’s remaining reserves to be even lower, at about $1 
billion in cash. “Nobody is paying taxes. There is no fuel, and the 
electricity runs just a few hours a day,” Abrahim Miro, a Syrian 
economist based in the Netherlands, who advises the opposition Syrian 
National Coalition, told TIME last week in Morocco, where rebel leaders 
met Western and Arab foreign ministers. “Everybody feels the government 
is going to fall,” Miro says.
 
It may seem strange that Syria’s government is still standing at all. 
Since last year international sanctions have halted its sales of oil and 
gas, which are crucial exports for Syria, and blocked its international 
banking transactions. The regime has been operating for months on 
outside help from Iran and Russia, in much the same way as the rebel 
economy operates on donated cash, largely from Qatar and Saudi Arabia; 
the billions in assistance to Syria from Moscow is in the form of loans, 
rather than gifts, meaning that Assad’s successors could ultimately be 
saddled with huge wartime debts to Russia. “There is some liquidity 
coming into the system that is keeping the country afloat for a while, 
but it is not sustainable,” says Garbis Iradian, Syria expert at the 
IIF. “Within a few months, if there is no solution the economy could 
force the regime to collapse,” he said by phone this week.
 
To gauge how bad Syria’s finances are, look at the figures: The Syrian 
pound has roughly halved in value, from 46 to the dollar in early 2011 
to about 90 to the dollar now. In 2010, Syria was debt-free, and its 
economy grew about 3.5% that year. The economy shrank in 2012 by about 
20%, in addition to the 3.5% drop last year, according to Iradian. That 
drop is not as severe as occurred during the civil wars in Bosnia and 
Lebanon, whose economies plummeted about 50% in two years, he says. But 
more and more of Assad’s pot of cash is being gobbled up by larger 
government subsidies for fuel, food and other basics, which now account 
for about 16.3% of GDP. Those are essential to keeping inflation in 
check and to stave off public anger, as Syrians struggle to survive 
through the turmoil. “The regime has been keen not to allow the exchange 
rate to jump, because it would create price increases, and the anger on 
the street would be higher,” says Seifan, the Syrian economist. “But 
there is no investment, no letters of credit to import from outside. The 
regime is using its reserve in very small quantities.”
 
Despite help from Gulf countries, Syria’s rebels, too, say they face a 
severe cash crisis, as the war drags on longer than expected, and as 
entire neighborhoods are razed. In Morocco last week, an opposition 
spokesman Yasser Tabbara told TIME, “It will cost about $500 million a 
month for us to administer freed areas, just to keep things afloat.” So 
far, that money has yet to be found. This week, the U.N. appealed to 
governments for $1.5 billion to help Syrians through the bitter winter, 
warning that millions face growing hunger, as food stocks dwindle in the 
war zones.
 
But it is the Syrian leader who faces total collapse in the face of 
bankruptcy. So dire are Assad’s finances, in fact, that in recent months 
Russia flew eight plane-loads of Syrian banknotes, printed in Russia, to 
Damascus, in a kind of rescue package estimated to weigh about 240 tons, 
according to flight records obtained by ProPublica, a U.S.-based 
non-profit investigative journalism organization. That cash, says 
Seifan, has helped to save Assad from total bankruptcy, and the Syrian 
leader has been cautious to use it slowly, fearing that another shipment 
might be a long time coming, and that pouring new money into the 
teetering economy could spark raging inflation.
 
Of course, it is impossible to know what Assad must be thinking, as the 
rebels inch ever closer to his palace doors. The Syrian leader said in a 
Russia Today television interview in November that he would “die in 
Syria,” and rejected all suggestion that he might voluntarily surrender 
power.
 
Still, as Assad faces impending bankruptcy, Seifan and Iradian believe 
that the end must seem increasingly real to him. And two startling 
statements over the past week signal a sense among his closest allies 
that they think his days in power are numbered. Last Friday Russia’s 
Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov told the Kremlin that “an 
opposition victory cannot be excluded,” and that Assad will 
“progressively lose control over an increasing part of the territory.” 
And on Monday Syria’s own Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa, was quoted in 
the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar saying that a “historic settlement” was 
needed to save Syria as a country, rather than saving “an individual or 
a regime.”
 
Now the question is: Will Assad’s allies Iran and Russia finally feel 
compelled to ditch their support for him? Russia’s spokesman insisted 
last week that it still stands by Assad, explaining Bogdanov’s comments 
by saying, “Russia stands for dialogue and against foreign 
interference.” But Assad’s close friend Iran, which Seifan believes has 
given more than $10 billion in wartime aid—some of it in desperately 
needed petroleum supplies is itself struggling to keep the help going. 
“Iran itself is not able to support Assad a lot,” Seifan says. “It is 
under sanctions, and the economic situation for Iran’s government is 
deteriorating.” That makes the outlook for Assad seem even grimmer.
-- 
Namib
.....
- God will take care of you. Whatever you need, God will give it to you.
- I need a shave. Am I next?
(Tom Kromer)

 > (Tom Kromer)
 
E chiaro come il giorno che la volonta' occidentale e' quella di prendere il 
potere in Siria.
 
Le sanzioni sono un crimine, contro l'umanita' e contro l'intelligenza.
 
Poveri idioti ci governano.
 
Rigor Montis
 
 


Sei un grillino filofascista?



 
State facendo tanta di quella confusione che vi ritroverete sotto Adolfo e 
pure entusiasti.
 
Date del fascista alla sinistra e siete alleati dei terroristi tagliagole 
islamici, pussy idiots?
 
 
 

 Date del fascista alla sinistra
 
Assad ï¿œ di "sinistra", mammalucco de mamma tua? E da quando in qua?


 to about 90 to the dollar now. 
 
non lo dire troppo forte, altrimenti Tonibaruch diventa assadiano.


Ah sì?
 
 
-- 
“Those who expect to reap the blessings of  freedom, must, like men,
undergo the  fatigues of supporting it.”  - North Idaho 21st Batallion of
Light Foot

 non lo dire troppo forte, altrimenti Tonibaruch diventa assadiano.
 
I prodotti siriani saranno un casino competitivi, l'anno prossimo :)



 
Che sinistrati.
 
Il punto e' se Assad e' di sinistra?
 
Somaro.
 
Il punto e' gli islamici sono a destra di Adolfo, e tu sei con loro.
 
 

 Il punto e'
 
...chi ha appena fatto un'iniezione.
