Egypt books a $2.8bn payments surplus as the pound slides toward 53 to the dollar

The Central Bank of Egypt published its balance of payments performance for FY2025/26, the year to 30 June, on Monday 12 October: an overall surplus of $2.8bn, against a $2.1bn deficit the previous year. Beneath that headline the components pull in opposite directions. The capital and financial account recorded net inflows of $23.2bn, up from $10.2bn. Remittances rose 29.6% to $47.3bn. The services surplus rose 10.5% to $16.7bn and Suez Canal transit receipts 21.6% to $4.4bn. The current account deficit widened by 46%, to roughly $22.5bn. Outlets split on which number to lead with: Daily News Egypt and the wires led on the surplus, Al-Manassa on remittances “curbing the negative impact of rising imports,” and the aggregator Rio Times on the deficit. The same release supports three headlines.

Net international reserves reached $57.348bn at end-September, described in Egyptian coverage as an all-time high, up $5.896bn over nine months from $51.452bn in December 2025. Fitch, affirming Egypt at ‘B' around 9 October, cited a different and narrower measure — gross reserves of $54.4bn in August, and the central bank’s net foreign asset position rising $5.6bn to $19bn. The definitions do not reconcile and should not be placed side by side. In the same week the pound weakened: Investing.com’s daily closes run 52.37 on 9 October to 52.78 on 13 October, and Amwal Al Ghad’s survey of five major banks put the average at 52.98 buy / 53.08 sell at 11:22 local on Wednesday 14 October. The attribution of that slide to oil prices and foreign outflows appears in this sweep only in Rio Times, an aggregator, and is not independently supported.

The $8bn Extended Fund Facility was extended to end-2026 when the IMF Board approved the combined fifth and sixth reviews and released $2.27bn. That is now eleven weeks away. Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said on Sunday 4 October, in a CNN Business Arabic interview reported secondhand, that Egypt sees no need for a new programme. The Fund’s own staff report, Country Report 26/69, records the current account deficit narrowing to 4.2% of GDP in FY2024/25 from 5.4%, and describes Egypt as the Fund’s fifth largest exposure in the General Resources Account, with capacity to repay “adequate but subject to risks and contingent on full program implementation and the materialization of all projected financing.”

Assessment: Record reserves and a sliding pound in the same week is not a contradiction; it is what reserve accumulation looks like when the inflows that built it begin to turn. The load-bearing unknown is the composition of that $23.2bn capital and financial account: direct investment and portfolio money decay on entirely different timetables, and the headline surplus tells you nothing about which it was. Treat the 46% widening of the current account deficit as the number to track and the $2.8bn surplus as the number Cairo will quote. Nothing this week resolves what follows the EFF at the end of December.