📬 MENA Unleashed is on Substack, providing regular analysis on the constant stream of geopolitical events in the region. We dissect the economics and trade route dynamics behind overwhelming news, breaking them down into concise, digestible insights on a region caught in the crossfire of Great Power competition. menaunleashed.com/

Seven months of maximum pressure on Iran, and Washington now quietly lets some Iranian gas tankers through to calm energy markets, with oil still over $100. So the blockade bends the moment American drivers might feel it (how principled). Iran still shipped 153 million barrels in those seven months. The blockade was never built to starve Tehran, only to decide when it gets paid, in which currency and through whose hands. And when the reconstruction money finally comes, who will hold the tap? menaunleashed.com/p/a-pentag…

Egypt's government wants your dollars, not your pounds, and this weekend it said as much in plain Arabic. The pound hit 55.89 to the dollar on Sunday, the weakest it has ever been. Foreign selling was heavy enough that the exchange stopped trading for half an hour after one index fell 10%. The same weekend, the housing ministry put 57 plots of land in 14 new cities on sale, and you can only buy them with dollars sent from abroad. Around $385.8 million worth, with applications in the first two weeks of November. So state land in Egypt is now priced in a currency most Egyptians are never paid in. If you earn in pounds, you are a spectator in your own country's property market. The buyer the ministry wants is the Gulf investor or the Egyptian working in Riyadh, and nobody else. And at the shop the dollar is already doing its work. Cooking oil is up more than 25%, cheese 10 to 15%, and chicken feed jumped 1,000 pounds a tonne in a single day. That last one makes me angry, because it lands straight on the cheapest protein a family can still afford. Lebanon spent the years before 2019 chasing dollars from abroad with ever bigger rewards, while people at home lived in lira. Cairo watched how that ended. Either the central bank defends the pound when it meets on Thursday and chokes borrowing for everyone, or it lets the slide run and selling the country for dollars becomes the policy.

Hospital staff in Saudi Arabia are losing the one job families planned whole lives around, the civil service post. More than 130,000 Health Ministry employees have already been moved onto the books of Health Holding, a state company, and roughly 170,000 more receive their offers from 10 December. Each of them gets 10 days to accept or reject. Health Holding says more than 99% of those who stated a preference in the first two rounds said yes, which tells you less about enthusiasm than about how hard it is to refuse the state when the deadline is that short. In 2023 the ministry employed 300,836 people. Within months nearly all of them will answer to a company, and I find it hard to watch a nurse's security treated as a paperwork step.

Turkey has decided what its savers' losses are worth, and parliament wrote the number into law this week. One million lira each, indexed to inflation, for money stuck in the funds the regulator ordered wound up on 17 September, with the fund managers charged first. 114 people have been arrested, one of them a former head of the state insurer. The Istanbul market has lost about a third since September, and Norway's wealth fund, holding about $2.2bn of Turkish shares, now calls itself a victim. Norway will be fine. A family with more than a million lira in a fund the state itself licensed has been promised nothing above that line, with inflation still near 30%, and it is hard to see who in Ankara thinks that is fair.

A government job in Saudi Arabia was always the safe bet families planned around, and for health workers that's quietly ending. More than 130,000 Health Ministry staff have already been moved onto the books of a state company, Health Holding, and roughly 170,000 more get their offers from 10 December with 10 days to accept or reject. Ten days. Ten days to give up a civil service post (I'd want longer than that for a phone contract). Health Holding says more than 99% of those who stated a preference in the first two rounds accepted.

The fund Kuwait built for its grandchildren is now paying this month's wages, and the decree that allows it went through in September with barely a murmur outside the country. Up to 10% of the Future Generations Reserve can now be borrowed, because the budget has a 9.8bn dinar hole (about $31.9bn) and roughly 76% of all state spending goes on salaries and subsidies. The IMF expects the economy to shrink 16.7% this year. That reserve existed for one reason, the day oil stops paying. Nobody asked the children it was meant for whether they wanted it spent on 2026 (and it is hard to read that without some anger). So what is left for that day?

If you only read us here, you're missing the part that's growing fastest. The short videos go out most days now, under a minute each, with real footage and the numbers on screen. Aramco emptying its own headquarters. Qatar signing up to buy American gas until 2054. The kind of thing that's easier to send to your family than a long post. TikTok tiktok.com/@mena_unleashed YouTube youtube.com/@menaunleashed Follow there too. Same analysis, just faster.

Turkey has now written into law how much of a saver's money the state will rescue from the fund scandal, and the answer is up to 1 million lira, indexed to inflation, and not a lira more. Parliament passed it this week. It covers the funds the market regulator ordered wound up on 17 September, with losses charged first to the fund managers and then to people the regulator names personally, while the arrests have reached 114, including a former head of the state insurer, and the Istanbul market has lost about a third since September. Even Norway's wealth fund, holding about $2.2bn of Turkish shares, now calls itself a VICTIM.

Saudi stocks just fell for an eighth straight week, the longest losing run since 1994. Same week, Riyadh told restructuring state bodies to plan exits for surplus staff. Into the private sector? Hardly, that's where the losses are. So who is meant to be buying?

Iraq ran a $20 billion deficit in eight months, and the prime minister has just promised 120,000 new state jobs in the 2027 budget. Either oil climbs back fast, or who pays those salaries?

Netanyahu is now preparing Israelis for life under sanctions, and he admitted it himself, days before the election. Asked on television on Friday whether Western banking sanctions were coming, he said of course he was worried, that Israel needs to organise a bypass economy, and that he has already asked for a plan built on digital currencies and blockchain. That is the vocabulary Tehran and Caracas use about themselves. The pressure can already be counted. One Israeli policy institute lists 121 measures against Israel in 62 countries, and 40 of them sit in finance, which means the banks, payments and investment that every exporter depends on. Britain sanctioned settlements, and Israel answered by downgrading the British consulate and expelling most of its staff. His own tech bosses answered within a day. Their forum, which speaks for dozens of senior figures in the sector, said the industry lives and breathes a free market, and that a crypto economy would close companies, stop investment and push operations abroad. Then they said a leader who offers surrender and adaptation to ruin has lost the right to lead (I did not expect to read that sentence from Israeli high tech, ever). But the arms makers cannot run on crypto either. The Haifa refinery, Rafael, Israel Aerospace Industries and Elbit all trade through the same Western banks the sanctions would close. Nobody sells an F-35 spare part for a token.

Everyone calls the UAE's new pipelines and east coast ports resilience. I think it is flight, and Tehran has just shown why it cannot work. The Revolutionary Guards now say seven big data cables run under the Gulf and Hormuz, and that they could be hit if the US goes after Iran's infrastructure. And you cannot reroute a cable through Fujairah, a port Iran has already set alight more than once, which should frighten Abu Dhabi far more than any tanker attack. menaunleashed.com/p/the-flig…

Cairo says Egypt's economy can take off without the IMF now, right after the Fund's last $2.3 billion refuels it by December.

Iran's central bank governor says Washington has failed to collapse the economy. Technically true, it is still standing. Hemmati credits the food voucher and slower growth in the money supply, and he posted the victory on his Telegram channel on Friday. Iranian families are paying for that victory. The dollar touched 274,000 tomans on Thursday, roughly double where it started the year, and prices are up 89.8% on last September. And last month the welfare system struck 297,000 people off the cash subsidy list after checking their cars, homes and incomes. Cutting middle-income families off, while their shopping bill nearly doubles, is cruel, and nobody in Tehran will call it that. Bessent promised in September that Iran would have nothing left to trade within two weeks. That deadline passed as well. So who exactly won?

From January, a small flat using 500 kWh a month goes from paying about SAR 100 for power to about SAR 175. Same flat, same air conditioner. Most of the jump is a new fixed charge that starts at SAR 70 a month whether you switch anything on or not (in winter, when the AC is barely running, that charge is most of your bill). The power company, now called Saudi Energy, raises the household rate from 18 to 21 halalas and swaps the old meter fee for a fixed charge set by the size of your connection. Shops, factories and government offices pay more too. Water goes up from the same day. The cushion came the same day. SAR 500 a month for civil servants, the military, pensioners and families on social security, paid by the Treasury. And a higher wage before a Saudi counts in the localisation quotas, SAR 5,000 and then SAR 6,000, paid by private employers. Everyone outside the state payroll, private sector workers, residents, every shop and clinic, just gets the bill. But the fixed charge is what Riyadh actually wanted. A utility that earns the same whatever the weather is a utility you can borrow against, and Saudi Energy is about three quarters owned by PIF, listed on Tadawul and a regular sukuk issuer. Its bondholders will like January a lot more than its customers.

I think Lebanon's savers are quietly being told to forget a third of their money. The central bank governor puts what it owes the banks at about $79 billion, then says roughly a third of that may be disputed over irregularities and abnormal cases, which leaves something like $50 billion for the people whose dollars vanished. The law deciding who loses is now hoped for by mid-2027. The banks shut their doors on them in 2019. Picture a pensioner in Beirut still queuing at the same branch window.

Israel's government found money for "urgent" classified weapons nine days before an election. From schools. The cabinet cut 4.9% from every ministry, NIS 2.6 billion in all, and the legal advisers warned it would disrupt services in the middle of an election campaign before signing off anyway. Education loses NIS 280 million, health 150 million, welfare 140 million. The one pot nobody touched was the coalition money, the funds that keep the religious parties and the settlement minister inside the government. Earlier, NIS 1 billion for American Apache helicopters came largely out of a five-year development plan for Arab towns. Gulf rulers at least pay for their American jets out of oil money. Israel sends the bill to its own poorest citizens and files it under security. So the weapons are urgent, the coalition money is sacred, and the district nurse can wait. Who exactly is being defended on Tuesday?

Aramco emptied its own headquarters in Dhahran this week. First time in this war, and honestly the missiles are only half of it. Aramco insures most of what it owns through its own insurer in Bermuda, which passes the big risks on to reinsurers abroad. After Abqaiq in 2019 its cover above $200 million didn't even include war or terror, and it had to go to London to buy more. So who really decides whether people sit in that building? Not Riyadh. The insurers moved first.

Qatar buying American gas until 2054 made no sense to me until I looked at who carries the risk. The seller in Texas and Louisiana gets a fixed fee on every tonne, whatever the market does. Qatar pays for the ships and takes the hit if prices fall. And its signature is what gets the next American export plant built (the banks lend against it, not against Cheniere's hopes). So the biggest gas field on earth now delivers for its own competitor.

Kuwait has started spending its grandchildren's money to pay this month's salaries, and almost nobody outside Kuwait noticed. The government is the one that blinked. This year's budget carries a 9.8bn dinar hole, about $31.9bn, and roughly 76% of all spending goes on salaries and subsidies. The IMF now expects the economy to shrink 16.7% this year. Kuwaiti citizens on the state payroll win, for now. A decree in September let the government borrow from the Future Generations Reserve, up to 10% of its value, so the wages keep landing. The future generations themselves were never asked. That reserve was built for the day oil stops paying. If it is covering this year's payroll, what is left for that day?