Record reserves, an IMF programme expiring in December, and a canal forecast made before the war
Egypt’s net international reserves hit $56.29bn in July on a 47-month rising streak. The Fund’s arrangement runs out on 15 December, and the Suez Canal Authority’s own revenue guidance now requires a 71% jump.
The Central Bank of Egypt put net international reserves at $56.2939bn at end-July, up $1.22bn from $55.0723bn in June — an all-time high and, per Egypt Today, the 47th consecutive monthly increase. The H1 series carried by Daily News Egypt shows NIR rising $3.62bn over six months from $51.452bn in December 2025, with waypoints of $52.594bn in January and $52.746bn in February. The August print, due imminently on the CBE’s publication pattern, is the first that would carry any drag from the US–Iran war on tourism receipts and canal dues. Against that, the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility — approved in December 2022, extended through 15 December 2026 — expires in fourteen weeks. The Board completed the combined fifth and sixth EFF reviews and the first RSF review on 26 February, releasing about $2bn and $273m respectively, taking total purchases to roughly $5.21bn. No seventh review, successor arrangement or exit has been announced.
The canal is where the arithmetic is hardest. Suez Canal Authority chairman Ossama Rabie told Ahmed Mousa on Sada al-Balad on 28 June that FY2025/26 revenue came in at $4.67bn, or EGP 230.22bn, up 23% year on year — an authority claim on television, not an audited account. He set that against a 2024 trough of $3.9bn, with vessel numbers down 50% and cargo traffic down 64.4%, and attributed the recovery to the Sharm el-Sheikh summit and the Gaza ceasefire it produced. But the SCA’s own forecast, delivered by Rabie via the State Information Service on 8 December 2025 and presented to an IMF mission, is around $8bn for FY2026/27 and potentially $10bn the year after. From a $4.67bn base that is a 71% jump in a fiscal year that began on 1 July — guidance issued before a war that Xi Jinping himself cited this week as a threat to regional shipping. No revised SCA guidance has been published.
Assessment: The reserves streak is the number Cairo will lead with and the least informative of the three. NIR is a stock that Gulf deposits, portfolio inflows and Fund drawings can hold up while the flows underneath deteriorate; the streak has survived a canal collapse of 64% in cargo terms, which tells you what it is measuring and what it is not. The unresolved question is sequencing. If the EFF lapses on 15 December without a successor, Egypt loses both the disbursements and the external discipline that anchors the rest of the financing stack in the same quarter that an unrevised $8bn canal forecast has to start being reconciled with reality. Watch which of the two Cairo moves first. We have no current Red Sea transit count and will not characterise present traffic without one.