Episode: 108 — "The Most Important Things You Don't Know About Money" · Full Episode #108
Guest: Nasr Elhadi
Date: 22 February 2022
Between roughly 2009 and 2015, Nasr Elhadi built one of the largest fast-fashion retail businesses in Tripoli. The portfolio included the Libyan franchise rights for New Look, Tommy Hilfiger, Timberland and Burberry accessories. At peak, the operation was opening a new store roughly every six months.
The flagship was New Look. For a period during the early 2010s the Tripoli franchise ranked first, globally, on the metric of per-customer spend. The ranking surprised the brand's London head office. It did not surprise the people running the Tripoli stores. Libya in those years was a market with significant disposable income — the legacy of oil revenues and a small middle class — and almost no brand retail. A Tripoli customer who walked into a New Look store was not browsing. She was buying multiple items because brand retail was a new feature of the country, and she did not assume the store would still be there next month.
The Ramadan numbers reflected this. The single largest store recorded daily revenues on the order of fifty thousand Libyan dinars during the month — figures that would have been considered strong in a much larger European market.
The empire was destroyed inside four years. The mechanism was the dinar collapse.
The business model depended on the Libyan dinar being effectively pegged to the dollar through the central bank, which supplied importers with foreign currency at the official rate. When war intensified in 2014 and 2015 the central bank lost the ability to supply dollars consistently. The black market took over. The dinar's effective exchange rate moved from approximately 1.3 per dollar to 5 per dollar, then to 7, then beyond. Stock that had been priced for the old rate became unsellable at any price that allowed the next shipment to be financed. Invoices came due in hard currency that the business could not legally acquire at the rate the model required.
Nasr describes spending the better part of a year trying to keep stores open before closing them. The closure was not a single event. It was an accumulation of decisions to release leases, run down stock, let staff go.
The lesson Nasr drew from the period — the lesson that, by EP 108, has become the centre of how he discusses money — is that he had not, until the collapse, understood what money was.
His argument: money is stored time. Money is the receipt for effort already expended — hours worked, goods sold, services rendered — converted into a portable claim on future goods. A currency that is debased is, in this framing, the theft of time that has already been worked. The Libyan dinar collapse was not, primarily, a financial event. It was the cancellation of years of accumulated effort by people who had no part in the decisions that produced the cancellation.
The position is the foundation of Nasr's later interest in Bitcoin and stablecoins. The point is not the speculative asset class. The point is the question: in a country whose currency cannot reliably hold the time you have stored in it, where do you put the time you have stored?
The story sits next to The Dinar Collapse as the long-form treatment of how a national monetary failure becomes a private commercial failure. It is also a study in the asymmetry of risk in frontier markets: the upside of building a New Look franchise in a country without brand retail is enormous, and so is the downside of building it on a currency whose stability is a political variable.