We can only hope that Trump Always Chickens Out

Good morning, wonderful people. Well, it’s been nearly 17 hours and the hell that The Donald promised in his unhinged, interfaith Easter message is yet to come to pass. Praise be to Allah, indeed. The risk this time is that it’s not a TACO play — he’s set Tuesday as the deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The private sector is feeling the pinch of the US-Israel war, with the purchasing managers’ indexes for the UAE, Saudi, and Egypt in particularly grim territory. The Saudi PMI fared the worst: It’s in negative territory for the first time since August 2020 as new orders crashed. The UAE gauge fared better, but was the worst in nearly four years, while sentiment in Egypt is at an all-time low.

Adding to the drumbeat of grim news: The 1H 2026 IPO window is now largely closed, bankers tell us. Companies in Saudi don’t want to pay a premium to raise debt. And Emirates Global Aluminum, the UAE’s biggest non-oil-and-gas industrial outfit, says it could take 12 months to bring its Al Taweelah facility back online.

From Cairo to Brussels and New York, governments and investors don’t know which way is up. Egypt just moved to WFH Sundays, global private equity players say the war and the AI overhang have poisoned exits, the EU is warning member states not to turn surging energy prices into a fiscal crisis. The end of history, indeed. –Patrick