📬 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/

Libya's prime minister stood up in Doha on Sunday, in front of investors, and said his country owns about $150 billion of financial assets abroad. Back home, people in Tripoli are queuing from dawn for a gas cylinder to cook dinner. The cylinder costs 2 dinars at the official price. On the black market it now goes for about 80, forty times more, and most private depots in Janzour have a sign up saying there is no gas. The state fuel company blames late tankers. So a gas exporter, with its own pipeline to Italy, is waiting for a boat to bring its cooking gas (I still find that hard to type). And the $150 billion? He did not say how he got there. The official direct portfolio was $41.7 billion at the end of 2025, part of the money has been frozen since 2011, and nothing else was explained. He promised to preserve it for future generations, which is generous, since the current generation cannot get a cylinder. Iraq does a version of this too. Its central bank said on Sunday that reserves have reached $80 billion, the same week generator owners in Wasit were threatening to switch off over their fuel quota. The big number is always for the foreign investors in the room, never for the people outside the depot. In Tripoli this week, a family pays 80 dinars to cook, or it waits all day and goes home with nothing.

I think Kuwait is quietly handing its housing promise to the banks. The state used to lend families the money to build, but its housing lender is under mounting cash pressure, so the new mortgage law lets a citizen borrow up to 210,000 dinars from a bank over 25 years. One bank boss expects household loan books to double in seven years, from 18 billion dinars to 36 billion (that pace worries me). The house still gets built, and the family pays a bank for it until retirement.

Chicken prices in Iran are a decision about who gets dollars, and families lost it. Remember the promise when the cheap food dollar was scrapped? The money saved was meant to come back to households as ration credit. Instead, chicken went from 280,000 to 350,000 tomans a kilo in a single week, and a full day on the minimum wage, 554,000 tomans, now buys about 1.5 kg. The agriculture minister blames world feed prices, without giving a number. But poultry farmers say their feed costs rose fivefold once the preferential rate went. Luxury car importers still get hard currency, and one debtor owes the oil ministry about $4 billion, roughly a month of Iran's oil income. Families pay the difference at the butcher.

Riyadh is moving its oil closer to its customers, because it no longer trusts its own exits. Saudi Arabia will store crude in Singapore's underground rock caverns from the second half of 2027. Aramco did the same in Okinawa in 2017 and in South Korea's Ulsan in 2023, so the new part is the timing, with Hormuz under fire and the Houthis claiming strikes on Riyadh's airport. Singapore gets Saudi oil sitting in its caverns for any emergency of its own. Not a bad deal for a city with no oil. The two ministers call it a new phase of cooperation. And who pays for the tankers getting there in the meantime? By the end of 2027, I expect India or China to ask Riyadh for the same arrangement.

Everyone watching Hormuz is watching the oil price. Almost nobody is watching what this war is pouring into the water. Umm Al Quwain has shut every beach and stretch of its coast. Ras Al Khaimah closed all its beaches until further notice, and Sharjah closed Al Hamriyah. The slick, about 160 square kilometres on satellite images, is being tied to the Gem No. 2, a tanker hit by an unidentified projectile on 9 October. Two weeks later it's a few kilometres from the shore. And that's one tanker. The Gulf is a shallow, almost closed sea that takes years to flush itself out, and the countries around it drink it (Qatar and Kuwait get nearly all their drinking water from desalination plants on that same coast). Every mine, every burning tanker, every hit on a terminal adds to it. When the war ends, the bill for the water will still be arriving.

Israel kept petrol, water and bus fares down right up to tomorrow's vote. Why now? Because the bill lands in November. Who pays it?

Saudi Arabia's ambassador sat down with Syria's customs chief in Damascus this week to talk about modernising Syrian customs and speeding up trade, after the same Syrian official had already met the Saudi transport minister in August about ports, free zones and dry ports. Israel was not in either room. The trade route from the Gulf to Europe that Washington once drew through the port of Haifa is being rebuilt through Syria and Iraq instead, and every customs desk and dry port agreed in Damascus moves it a step further from Israel. menaunleashed.com/p/the-us-t…

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.