50 Līrah / Pounds stainless steel

Lebanon's 1996 coinage came during a fragile postwar reconstruction period — the Taif Agreement had formally ended the civil war in 1990, but the Lebanese pound had already shed the vast majority of its value during fifteen years of conflict. By the time this piece entered circulation, the pound had stabilized under a fixed exchange rate policy championed by Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and the newly reconstituted Banque du Liban, a deliberate monetary anchor designed to signal institutional normalcy. The stainless steel composition reflects that austerity — silver and nickel-clad options were simply not practical for a denomination worth fractions of a US cent.