Sisi tells the central bank to hold the line as reserves reach a record $57.5bn
Egypt’s net foreign reserves hit $57.500bn at end-October, roughly $6bn above December 2025. The president’s public instruction to sustain them arrives five weeks before the IMF’s target date for the final programme review.
The Central Bank of Egypt put net foreign reserves at $57.500bn at end-October, a record, in its monthly release carried by Amwal Al Ghad, the Egyptian Gazette and others on 6–7 November. The comparator is clean: Reuters reported net foreign reserves of $51.452bn at end-December 2025, making the gain roughly $6bn across ten months. Around 10 November the Egyptian Gazette reported that President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi called for sustaining safe forex reserve levels, with Daily News Egypt covering the same presidency line. The Files has not obtained the Presidency’s own readout and is not quoting the president. The sequencing is what is notable: a head of state does not usually instruct a central bank in public to maintain a buffer it has just announced it holds.
The timing points at the IMF. Reuters reported on 29 October that the Fund aims to have Egypt’s last programme review cleared by mid-December, a target MEES repeated on 6 November and The National carried the same day as Reuters. The architecture, per Ahram Online, is an $8bn Extended Fund Facility extended to end-2026, with $2.27bn approved at the most recent review. The dissenting read came from bne IntelliNews around 5 November, under the headline that Egypt is betting on old loans and rollovers as it prepares to exit the deal — in effect the question of whether the record reserve stock is owned or borrowed. The composition of the $57.5bn, in deposits, repos and swap lines against owned assets, is not broken out in the CBE’s headline figure.
Assessment: Three readings of the Sisi intervention are available and they are not the same story: pre-positioning the fiscal narrative for an IMF exit, signalling reassurance to Gulf depositors whose money may sit inside the headline number, or capping domestic expectations that a record reserve stock means room to loosen the pound. Until the Presidency readout is published, none can be privileged. The useful discipline is to treat $57.5bn as a gross headline rather than a net position. Note too how this file and the Suez file converge: canal receipts are the most visible non-borrowed dollar inflow Cairo has, which is why the authority’s revenue releases now carry political weight well beyond shipping.