How a Syrian refugee influenced one business journalist

Henry Dubroff, the editor and founder of the Pacific Coast Business Times, writes about how Marwan Jabri, a Syrian refugee and banking reporter for the newspaper in Springfield, Mass., influenced him when he started working at the paper.

Dubroff writes, “Marwan had a gift for understanding the sometimes arcane accounting of the banking business. He grasped the importance of things like capital ratios and stable, low-cost deposits — things that I had studied in theory at Columbia but had not yet experienced in a real-time setting.

“He assiduously watched the banking beat and pointed out small anomalies in loan reserves or rising deposit costs. Fortunately for us, we were covering business news in the aftermath of the ‘double-dip’ recession in the early 1980s. Bank balance sheets were strengthening dramatically as real estate prices rose and interest rates tumbled from the double-digit levels forced on the economy by the Federal Reserve to break the back of inflation.

“I left the Springfield Newspapers in 1985, and Marwan retired soon thereafter. He did in 2000 at age 71.

“Marwan’s rules of the road for spotting banking problems have served me well over the years.”

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