A strategic simulation of financial reconstruction, power, finance, technology and trust.
Lebanon 2036The Trust Bargain
The losses already happened. Can you build a settlement anyone will believe?
Lebanon 2036: The Trust Bargain is a strategic simulation built for executive education and policy analysis on the country's financial reconstruction. Grounded in the research of Zakaryae Boudi, it sets aside the reassuring mechanics of building things and stays with the harder problem: allocating losses that have already been incurred, exercising institutional power that is always partial, and rebuilding public trust that no instrument can manufacture. Players hold a specific entity — the central bank, the finance ministry, a depositor union — and negotiate inside real legal, financial and ethical limits, where every decision carries a traceable accounting consequence. It is a disciplined laboratory for one question: whether a credible settlement can be reached among stakeholders who do not trust each other and do not have to agree.
The premise
The losses already happened.
They were incurred years ago, when the deposits were spent. Everything since has been a fight over their accounting recognition.
This is the design law the engine enforces rather than merely states. A move can recognise a loss, defer it, finance it, reallocate it or disguise it. There is no way to express “delete”, because no such move exists, and no ledger technology has ever allocated one.
- Conservation is enforced by the engine, not by the referee: a move can recognise, defer, finance, reallocate or disguise a loss, and never delete it.
- Nine validation gates — authority, sequence, sources and uses, capacity, coalition, operations, distribution, adoption, delayed effects — explain what is missing instead of refusing you.
- Counterparties are scripted institutions with published red lines, so a player who reads them and takes them seriously can reason a package through.
A scenario draw inside the range the underlying research states and explicitly refuses to settle. At the opening, none of it has been assigned to anyone, which is not neutral. It is being paid, in real time, through inflation, exit, lost services and waiting.
The rules that do not bend
Six constraints, enforced by construction.
These are not difficulty settings. They are the reason a session produces an argument worth having rather than a score worth beating.
- 01
Conservation
A move may recognise, defer, finance, reallocate or disguise a loss. It cannot delete it. No ledger technology allocates losses.
p. xxviii
- 02
Sequence
Law precedes audit, audit precedes registry, and registry precedes instrument. Scenarios that invert the sequence are premature regardless of merit.
pp. xxix, 85
- 03
Trust inheritance
An instrument's credibility is inherited from its issuer's balance sheet and legal accountability, never from its ledger technology.
p. 29
- 04
Institutional agency
You need mandates, signatures, votes, funding and partners. Crisis resolution normally assumes a referee; in Lebanon the referee is a party.
p. 5
- 05
Real alternatives
A competent database with published hashes, a guarantee, an open-data reform or an existing rail is always available as a comparator, and frequently wins.
p. 84
- 06
Plural endings
There is no winner and no single score. You will see who gained, who paid, and what was left unresolved.
pp. 181-183
The institutions you can lead
Every character is an organisation, never a person.
Roles are asymmetric, different powers, different information, different exposure, and all of them can pursue legitimate objectives. There is no national planner, and no chair from which the whole board is visible.
The founding three are open to any account and are a complete act in themselves. The counterpart institutions, the ones you spend that act negotiating against, are part of the member programme.
- BDL
Banque du Liban
Monetary authority under the Code of Money and Credit (1963): issuance monopoly, the payment system, supervision of banks and e-money issuers, custody of reserves and gold, and, since Law 23/2025, the chair of the resolution authority.
Central tensionStability and control against disclosure and loss recognition.
- MoF
Government / Ministry of Finance
Fiscal policy, the cabinet agenda, public debt and state assets, and negotiation with the IMF, donors and Eurobond creditors. Holds a reform mandate and donor access; runs a coalition that can withdraw at any vote.
Central tensionFiscal feasibility against coalition survival.
- Depositors
Small-depositor union
Represent household depositors below the protected-tier threshold. Power is exercised on the street and in the courts: thousands of individual suits, the Daher petitions against Circulars 151 and 165, and, in 2022, a wave of armed 'deposit liberations' treated leniently by courts and public opinion.
Central tensionNominal promises against a fair and credible present value.
- ABLMembers
Commercial banks / Association of Banks
Represent licensed banks and their shareholders. Roughly sixty licensees hold USD 80.6bn of placements at BDL, about 91 percent of remaining deposits, against pre-crisis book capital near USD 20bn. The association has been the most consistently effective veto player of the crisis, and it has never had to win a vote to exercise it.
Central tensionSurvival of the franchise against the recapitalisation that would make it credible.
- BlocMembers
Parliamentary finance bloc
A bloc in the Finance and Budget Committee, holding enough votes to carry or sink the Gap Law. No capital-control law has ever passed; Law 23/2025 passed with its loss annex suspended. The chamber's power in this crisis has mostly been the power not to act, and May's elections are visible in every position now taken.
Central tensionDoing the thing that works against surviving the people it costs.
- FundMembers
IMF and donor group
Staff negotiating a programme, alongside the donor group and the FATF process. The April 2022 staff-level agreement lapsed through non-implementation, not disagreement; the restarted process converges on three pillars, loss allocation, restructuring execution, and a medium-term fiscal anchor. External anchors substitute for absent domestic trust, which is the whole of this institution's leverage.
Central tensionLeverage that only works while the money is still withheld.
A turn, end to end
Five steps, and a trace of everything that moved.
- 01
Briefing
What your institution can see this turn, and what only it can see. Other players read a different page.
- 02
Compose
Assemble up to three packages from typed slots — authority, instrument, amount, funding, timing, governance, safeguards, forum, disclosure, kill criteria.
- 03
Negotiate
Offer concessions to the counterparties whose signatures you need. Their stated red lines are public; their acceptance thresholds are not.
- 04
Resolve
The engine applies effects, runs counterparty responses, moves the institutions you are not running, and fires the shocks your own state has made likely.
- 05
Audit
The causal trace: every change, its cause, its size, its citation. Nothing moves in this simulation without saying why.
Scenarios
2 acts.
The Reform Window
3 turns · about 35 minutes · free accountThree turns inside the narrow opening the book describes as genuinely available: a resolution law enacted with its loss annex suspended, a Gap Law approved in cabinet and stuck, an IMF process restarted, and a FATF action plan running out. You hold one institution. The window closes whether or not you have used it.
Open The Reform Window →Playable institutions- Banque du LibanStability and control against disclosure and loss recognition.
- Government / Ministry of FinanceFiscal feasibility against coalition survival.
- Small-depositor unionNominal promises against a fair and credible present value.
- Commercial banks / Association of BanksMembersSurvival of the franchise against the recapitalisation that would make it credible.
- Parliamentary finance blocMembersDoing the thing that works against surviving the people it costs.
- IMF and donor groupMembersLeverage that only works while the money is still withheld.
Money That Works
8 turns · about 75 minutes · membersEight turns on the last mile. A loss law is enacted, a protected tier is statutory and a claims registry is live, and none of it has reached a counter. Roughly 46 percent of GDP moves in cash, remittances arrive at corridor costs above ten percent, and the most widely held dollar instrument in the country is licensed by nobody. Your competitor is not a bank.
Open Money That Works →Playable institutions- Banque du LibanMembersStability and control against disclosure and loss recognition.
- Government / Ministry of FinanceMembersFiscal feasibility against coalition survival.
- Small-depositor unionMembersNominal promises against a fair and credible present value.
- Commercial banks / Association of BanksMembersSurvival of the franchise against the recapitalisation that would make it credible.
- Parliamentary finance blocMembersDoing the thing that works against surviving the people it costs.
- IMF and donor groupMembersLeverage that only works while the money is still withheld.
The opening position
Every figure carries its grade, its source and its date.
Where the underlying work reports a contested range, the range is preserved rather than collapsed. Its methodological note names three numbers that are never presented as settled, the size of the gap, the deposit distribution and the central bank’s net equity. All three are load-bearing here, and all three are shown with their ranges.
A scenario draw inside the book's stated range: USD 70bn officially, credibly above 80bn [EXP]. The book never presents this number as settled.
Boudi, The Trust Architecture (IEI / AUB, 2026), pp. xxvii-xxviii, 4, 189
USD 86-93bn across roughly 1.26 million accounts. 84-85 percent of depositors hold under USD 100,000; the value share is inverted.
Boudi, The Trust Architecture (IEI / AUB, 2026), pp. 25, 189
Against roughly USD 14.2bn of realistically available liquidity, which is why every plan stretches even protected repayment over years.
Boudi, The Trust Architecture (IEI / AUB, 2026), pp. 25, 190
Gross, not net. A substantial share corresponds to banks' remaining placements, depositors' money once removed. The freely usable cushion is far smaller and is not transparently published.
Boudi, The Trust Architecture (IEI / AUB, 2026), pp. 18, 189 (BDL bi-weekly balance sheet, end-May 2026)
286.8 tonnes, 45-51 percent of BDL's balance sheet. Sale prohibited absent new parliamentary authorisation (1986 law). Auditors have not been permitted to physically verify the majority since 1996 [AUD].
Boudi, The Trust Architecture (IEI / AUB, 2026), pp. 18, 189
About 91 percent of remaining deposits. This is the triple balance-sheet interlock: depositors hold claims on banks, banks on BDL, BDL on a defaulted state.
Boudi, The Trust Architecture (IEI / AUB, 2026), pp. 25, 189
USD 31.3bn of principal across 29 series since March 2020 [V-OFF], approaching 42bn with arrears. The longest-running unresolved sovereign default of its size in the modern era.
Boudi, The Trust Architecture (IEI / AUB, 2026), pp. 33, 190
Traded 14-20 cents at the trough [MED/MKT]. The single most important number in the book: the observed market valuation of an unresolved Lebanese deposit claim, and the empirical prior for any instrument issued against one.
Boudi, The Trust Architecture (IEI / AUB, 2026), pp. 19, 190
USD 9.86bn (2022). Cash is not the absence of a system but a system: vaulting, transport, wholesale clearing and settlement finality. Its killer feature is that no circular can freeze it.
Boudi, The Trust Architecture (IEI / AUB, 2026), pp. 21, 190 (World Bank)
Arriving overwhelmingly as cash pickups through MTOs at corridor costs above 10 percent, against a global mean near 6, the most cleanly quantified pain point in the book.
Boudi, The Trust Architecture (IEI / AUB, 2026), pp. 20, 137, 190
Down from roughly USD 55bn: an 85 percent contraction that removed the banking system from the real economy.
Boudi, The Trust Architecture (IEI / AUB, 2026), pp. 25, 189
Against USD 88bn frozen: a 3.4 percent voluntary re-engagement rate seven years in. This is the adoption prior for every instrument in the book.
Boudi, The Trust Architecture (IEI / AUB, 2026), pp. 29, 189
What it is not
A disciplined counterfactual, and nothing more than that.
It does not predict an election, an exchange rate, a reform law or an institutional decision, and it does not identify a universally correct policy path. It is an environment in which you make your assumptions explicit and test whether a coalition can turn them into commitments that hold.
Output generated by play is graded SIM and can never be promoted into evidence about the world. No claim of realism is made ahead of review by affected local experts. Nothing here is legal, financial, humanitarian or investment advice.
Based on Zakaryae Boudi, The Trust Architecture: Exploring Lebanon's Financial Reconstruction and the Tokenization Dividend. Intelligence Economy Institute, in partnership with the American University of Beirut, 2026. Research cutoff mid-2026. Simulation rules and product design are IEI extensions of that framework, not findings of it.
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