Egypt’s reserves hit $57.5bn as the monthly gain turns out to be gold moving against dollars

Net international reserves rose to $57.4998bn at end-October from $57.3482bn at end-September, a gain of about $151.6m, or 0.26%, on the Central Bank of Egypt’s provisional release of Thursday 5 November. The stock is up about $6.05bn since the start of 2026, from $51.45bn at end-December 2025, and up about $7.43bn or 14.8% on the $50.07bn of end-October 2025. The composition is the part most outlets buried: foreign currency holdings increased by $768m to $40.06bn in October while the value of gold reserves declined by $613m to $16.84bn. Governor Hassan Abdalla — spelled Abdallah by some Egyptian outlets — told a financial markets conference on Friday that reserves had reached a record $57.5bn, reaffirmed commitment to a flexible exchange rate determined by market mechanisms, and said the banking sector’s net foreign assets had risen to their highest level since 2011 while inflation had declined.

The inflow behind the number is identifiable: central bank figures reported on 13 October put remittances at about $33.9bn in January–August 2026, up 27.2% year-on-year. The caution is on the record too, if thinly sourced — the economist Iten El Marghoushy, quoted by the small Egyptian business outlet SEE without institutional affiliation, said reserve resilience remains dependent on foreign currency inflows and exchange rate developments. The clock on the other side of the balance sheet is the Fund’s. Reuters reported on 29 October that the IMF said its current mission to Egypt aims to reach a staff-level agreement and take it to the executive board before mid-December. “The goal of these reforms is to support stronger, more private sector-led growth in Egypt,” the IMF’s director of communications, Julie Kozack, said at the 29 October briefing. The Fund has cautioned that structural reform implementation has been uneven, with progress on reducing the state’s footprint, particularly divestment of non-strategic assets, lagging.

Assessment: A record stock of reserves and a lagging divestment programme are not in contradiction; they are the trade. Remittances, canal tolls and valuation effects have bought Cairo the headline number, and the headline number buys time on the structural conditions the Fund keeps naming. That is why Saturday’s two directives matter to this desk and not only to the defence desk: they move in the opposite direction to the review that must clear the board before mid-December. One warning on sourcing — a balance-of-payments deficit figure circulating in aggregator sidebars, and October inflation and rate readings from the same copy, could not be verified against CAPMAS or the MPC statement and are therefore not printed here.