Cairo’s canal receipts and its Fund calendar are both running on numbers nobody published this week

The revenue record is thinner than the routing commentary suggests. Egyptian Streets reported on 30 June 2026 that Suez Canal receipts rose 23 percent year-on-year in fiscal 2025/26. In February, the canal authority’s chairman was quoted by Amwal Al Ghad and Daily News Egypt putting early-2026 revenue at $449m across 1,315 ships. The State Information Service — the government’s own outlet, so a target rather than a forecast — said in December 2025 that the authority projects 30 percent revenue growth by 2027. Against that, the widely repeated line that traffic remains 41 percent below pre-crisis volumes, and the authority’s description of a “considerable increase” in Maersk containership passages, reach us second-hand through Splash247’s late-August account rather than from a retrieved SCA release. No August or September monthly figure from the authority was obtained. The gap between the consultancies' capacity share and the canal’s own receipts is the number to watch, not the headline.

The financing side is equally static. The IMF Executive Board completed the fifth and sixth reviews under the Extended Fund Facility and the first under the Resilience and Sustainability Arrangement in a single action on 26 February 2026, bundled with a rephasing of access, an extension of the arrangements, a waiver of nonobservance of a performance criterion and modification of others. AGBI put the disbursement unlocked at about $2.3bn. The architecture of that decision — two reviews merged, the calendar rephased, a missed criterion waived — describes a programme being kept in step with reality rather than one running to plan. Banking-sector net foreign assets stood at $28.418bn in July 2026, or EGP 1.45 trillion, per the central bank. That is not the CBE’s own net foreign asset series, which was $15.22bn in May; the two are frequently confused. Figures circulating for August reserves and the pound rest on an aggregator with no Egypt reporting and are not published here.

Assessment: The seventh review date is the live variable and it is not public. February’s waiver matters less for what was forgiven than for whether the same criterion slips again, because that determines whether the next board action is routine or another bundle. Readers should treat Cairo’s growth prints and the Fund’s outlook as two different documents — the divergence has been a standing feature since April. And the Gulf question the desk keeps asking remains unanswered: not new tourism or real-estate FDI announcements, which are plentiful, but what the Gulf central banks are doing with deposits already sitting at the CBE. Silence there is not the same as rollover.