📬 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/

The Saudi state has decided who deserves help with the January electricity bill, and the answer is everyone it already pays. Civil servants, soldiers, pensioners and social security families get 500 riyals a month from January. The same month, the household tariff goes up 17% on the band most families sit in, and industry pays 15% more. Work for a private company? You get a promise that your employer must pay you at least 5,000 riyals in six months' time and 6,000 a year after that, and nothing towards the bill. The companies have started telling the stock exchange what the bill does to them. A glass maker filed on Tuesday that it adds 0.8% to its cost of sales. A building materials firm filed that it may raise production and sales costs, which is corporate language for the customer will pay it. And the brokers assure us the effect on inflation is limited. Limited for whom? Ten listed banks made 73.6 billion riyals in nine months, up 6.8% on last year, in the middle of a war, while the courts issued 272,448 enforcement orders on unpaid cheques and promissory notes in 2026, a third of them in Riyadh, and that number says more about who is short of cash than any tariff table does. The payroll gets cash. Everyone else gets the invoice. By the end of March 2027, the tariff will be in the price of every bag of cement and every pane of glass sold in the kingdom, and the 500 riyals will have bought the state exactly one quiet winter.

The Houthis have told travellers to avoid every Saudi airport except Mecca and Medina. Even the people bombing the kingdom know which two it cannot afford to lose.

Who bails out Bahrain when the rest of the Gulf is tightening too? The UAE, apparently. Bloomberg reports a UAE-led rescue after Bahrain's reserves fell, in the same year Qatar's revenues dropped 42% in six months and Kuwait has borrowed $25 billion abroad. Manama gets the cash. What it hands over in return is the part nobody announces.

Two years ago Riyadh was selling itself as the place the world comes to meet. This October it has been cancelling the world. The Future Investment Initiative, the conference they call Davos in the Desert, has gone virtual and moved to 2027 after Wall Street bosses told the sovereign fund they didn't feel safe flying in. The GCC-EU summit was postponed. The Misk Global Forum was cancelled. The UN World Data Forum was pushed to 2027. Five of the stadiums planned for the 2034 World Cup are being dropped, the $2.5 billion one at NEOM among them, and Etihad has no Saudi flights until 5 November. None of it is Riyadh changing its mind. King Khalid airport was hit, 12 people were killed in a single strike, and about 45% of departing flights were cancelled after 8 October. The model was simple. Capital follows confidence, and confidence follows a calendar of big events. When the events go, the capital leaves first, and the market is already at a five-year low. I don't think anyone who planned Vision 2030 wrote a page for this.

Europe now charges a flat duty on the cheap parcels Temu and Shein send its shoppers, and tariffs of up to 45% on Chinese electric cars, yet a lithium battery assembled in Morocco enters the EU at 0%. That gap is why Beijing has committed close to $10 billion to Moroccan industry and wants a free trade deal with a country of 38 million, when Moroccan goods already enter China almost duty free. If Brussels shuts the Moroccan door as well, who in Tangier and Kenitra is left with the bill? menaunleashed.com/p/beijing-…

"the Only Democracy in the Middle East".

Aramco is lining up a $10 billion credit line with Bank of China, ICBC, Citi, JPMorgan, HSBC and MUFG, Bloomberg reports, at a margin of barely 0.6% over the US benchmark rate. A revolving line is money you keep in the drawer for the day the cash stops arriving, and this month the Houthis have hit Aramco's headquarters, one of its oil fields, a refinery and the port at Yanbu. Chinese banks and American banks, side by side, lending to the same oil company in the middle of a war, because both need those barrels to keep moving.

Tehran keeps telling us the economy beat the American pressure campaign, and the banks would agree, as long as nobody checks their capital. Only 13 of Iran's 27 banks hold the 8% minimum cushion that Iranian law itself demands, according to the judiciary's spokesman, so 14 banks are running with too little between their bad loans and their customers' savings. Turkey has just spent a month learning what happens when savers discover a fund was hollow. The official cure is to order capital increases from shareholders who don't have the money. By March, expect at least one of those 14 to be merged, taken over or frozen.

X picks the posts you get to see. Telegram doesn't. Today alone we posted Egypt lending Saudi Arabia its air force, Saudi oil being parked in caves under Singapore, and Riyadh's main airport shut to normal flights since 10 October. Most people following here saw one of those, maybe two. The Telegram channel gets every post and every video, in order, nothing filtered, and it's quiet. No replies to wade through, no ads. Telegram t.me/menaunleashed2024 Join if you want all of it rather than whatever the feed picks.

Riyadh has worked out where its oil is safest, and it isn't Saudi Arabia. From 2027 Saudi crude will be stored in Singapore, under a deal the two governments announced this week. Aramco has been shopping abroad for storage and partner countries since the Houthis started hitting its sites, and it is pushing the East-West pipeline towards 10 million barrels a day so that less of its oil has to pass Hormuz at all. Clever, I'll give them that. A barrel sitting in a tank next to Asia's buyers can't be mined or droned, and it keeps the customers loyal when the strait shuts. But think about what it says. The world's biggest exporter now treats its own coast as the risk.

Washington tells Americans to avoid all but essential travel to Saudi Arabia. The same week, it hands Saudis an express lane into America. From today Saudi citizens can apply for Global Entry and TSA PreCheck, the US trusted-traveller programmes, which mean five years of skipping the queues at American airports once you pass the checks. Getting out of the kingdom is the hard part. About 45% of departing flights from Saudi airports were cancelled after 8 October, and the Houthis now tell travellers to avoid every Saudi airport except Mecca and Medina. So the fast lane is for the people who were going to fly to New York anyway (and the US is still pulling its own staff out of the kingdom).

Turkey has 2.74 million people out of work, and only 484,949 of them got an unemployment payment in September. Where did the fund's money go? To employers, 122 billion lira since January against 82.6 billion for the jobless. Workers pay into it, and their bosses collect.

Saudi Arabia is sending its oil to wait in caves under Singapore, because the sea around its own coast is no longer safe. On Monday, Riyadh and Singapore agreed that Saudi crude will be stored in rock caverns on an island off Singapore, from the second half of 2027. The kingdom stored oil in Japan in 2017 and in South Korea in 2023. The idea is old. What is new is the timing, with tankers hit near Hormuz every week and the Houthis claiming strikes on the capital's own airport. Singapore gets a reserve it can draw on in its own emergency, filled with oil it did not have to buy first. A city with no oil of its own now looks safer than the Saudi coast, and that is a hard thing for Riyadh to admit. Every barrel parked in Asia is a barrel that cannot be trapped inside the Gulf. I expect India or China to ask for the same arrangement before the end of 2027.

If you live somewhere the internet gets switched off, a Starlink dish is how you stay connected. It turns out it may also be how you get found. Reuters reports that an Israeli ad-tech firm, Discover-Tech, was the top bidder for ads shown to Starlink users in more than 100 countries, including several where Starlink is banned or restricted, and six sources say the ads were most likely used to locate or watch the people seeing them. Citizen Lab says the same firm's ads reached inside government, media and tech networks. Google and Comcast have since thrown it off their platforms. Think about who smuggles a dish into a country that bans it. Journalists, activists, people living through a blackout in a war. Every ad that loads on their screen tells a bidder roughly where they are. The escape route was being sold as a tracking device, one auction at a time.

Egypt is lending Saudi Arabia its air force, and Cairo is doing it because it cannot afford to say no. On Monday, parliament gave Sisi the power to defend the kingdom, in a closed session, with air defence and warplanes on the table and no troops for Yemen. The same week, the pound hit a record 56.35 to the dollar, and foreign investors pulled almost $4 billion out of Egyptian debt in ten days. Riyadh still has $5.3 billion sitting in Egypt's central bank. It falls due this month. Talks to keep it there have dragged since July. The Houthis have already told Cairo that joining in endangers Egypt itself, and they know where to aim, the Red Sea ships that pay for the Suez Canal. It is hard to watch a country of over a hundred million people rent out its air force to stop a deposit leaving, when the people who will pay for this war were never asked.

Saudi stocks are at their lowest in five years and foreigners now own 4.42% of the market. Nobody is coming to buy this dip.

Saudi Arabia cannot keep its own capital's airport open, and the people who lend it money have started charging for that. King Khalid airport in Riyadh has been shut to normal flights since 10 October, the disruption has cost it about $50 million, and the Houthis now tell airlines to avoid every Saudi airport except Mecca and Medina. The price of insuring Saudi government debt for five years reached 71 basis points this week, a six-month high and up 15 since the end of August. Bahrain already needs Gulf help. Riyadh has also agreed to store crude in Singapore's rock caverns from 2027, which says plenty about how safe it thinks its own coast is. A government borrowing at this pace pays more for every new loan, and I doubt the princes will be the ones who feel it, because that money comes out of salaries and services first.

The Houthis now call Egypt's decision to back Saudi Arabia militarily a declaration of war. Cairo walked into this with its eyes open, and the reason is money. Egypt's parliament has given Sisi the power to take defensive measures for the kingdom. In the same weeks the pound broke 55 to the dollar for the first time and is now near 56, Cairo is still chasing the IMF's last $2.3 billion, and it is negotiating with Riyadh to renew $5.3 billion of Saudi deposits sitting in its central bank. An army is one of the few things Egypt has left that the Gulf actually wants. So the creditor gets soldiers, the debtor gets its deposits rolled over, and the Houthis get a new list of targets (Suez traffic, Egyptian ships, the tourists who were already cancelling). Who asked Egyptians?

I think Riyadh has started paying for its Yemen war in the debt market, and the people paying won't be the ones who started it. The price of insuring Saudi government debt against default just hit a six-month high, up about a quarter since August, while the capital's main airport has been shut to normal flights since 10 October. (Bahrain already needs Gulf help.) For a state borrowing this much, the bill comes out of salaries and services.

There was no attack. And no it was not Israel per se but this was definitely the King himself. Look at the facts and context. Abdallah went to the UN last month and criticised Israel. Next day ge gets a big fat loan from US and Europe and now King is telling Syrians he is on Israel side against Syrians in the coming war with Israel. This was not an attack but a psyop to justify to Jordanians how their country today is simply an extension of the IDF and will fighting alongside Israel against Syrians in the upcoming war.