Gregg Carlstrom

speaker

496 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Gregg Carlstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Hard cedar: Lebanon seeks Trump’s help · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

On the other hand, we have a Lebanese state that is going to come in and secure the South and rebuild. matched

Really, the mechanism here is to try and drain Hezbollah's support by stepping in and providing the services that the government has long failed to provide in southern Lebanon. matched

But again, this is where the two problems come together, because to rebuild the South, you need resources. matched

And this government, seven years into an economic crisis, doesn't have those resources. matched

So they also need to tackle the economic side of it. matched

They need to make matched

a deal with the IMF. matched

They've been talking about that for years. matched

It hasn't happened because they haven't passed the reforms that the IMF insists on as a precondition. matched

Noef Salem's government has passed some of those reforms, but they haven't figured out how to apportion the eighty billion dollar losses in the banking sector between depositors and shareholders and the state. matched

And they haven't done it in part because the banks still have a lot of political power. matched

And their shareholders don't want to see their equity wiped out. matched

So they need to move faster on that. matched

They need to move faster on administrative reforms from strengthening the judiciary to trying to trim the enormous civil service. matched

There's a lot that they need to be doing on the economic front so that donors and investors will finally step in, give money to Lebanon, and then allow the government to start this process of reconstruction. matched

Almost made it through an interview without talking about Trump at length, but we can never do that these days. matched

I think President Aun wants three big things from Trump. matched

One is support for the Lebanese army. matched

It is underfunded, it needs better equipment, it needs money. matched

The second thing is this deal between Israel and Lebanon, because it is so vague on the question of withdrawal, the Lebanese will need America. matched

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