Waitlists at Cairo schools as expats in the Gulf come home?

Good morning, wonderful people, and happy Friday to you all. We have for you today a tale of two regions:

There are growing signs investors are leery of real estate players as layoffs, salary cuts, and contract terminations become increasingly common features of the business landscape in the Emirates and Saudi. Meanwhile, AWS warned its clients overnight to spin-up backups outside our region, and more than 100 events across the GCC have now been postponed or cancelled, most of them in the UAE and Saudi. (Good luck booking an event space for September…)

The ultimate sign of the times: Schools in Cairo are running waitlists as more and more parents hit “Go” on their plan Bs.

It’s a starkly different story on Planet Finance (at least for now), where the region’s BSDs brought home a crazy string of high-profile transactions this week, as we chronicle in our final Markets + Deals column of the week.

Uhm, Enterprise? What’s a BSD? It’s a Liar’s Poker reference, young ‘un.

From the Dept. of Hype: It’s day two of the FII Priority Summit in Miami, where some 2k people are circling, hoping to snag a coin or two from MbS’s pocket. Among them: Turing, which nabbed some kind of “strategic partnership” with the always-all-caps Humain to “build the world’s first AI agent marketplace for enterprise.” As the kids said a generation ago: Whatevs.

AND- DIFC would really like you to know that whether Millennium stays in town or not, it is now number seven on the Global Financial Centres Index, the “highest ever [ranking] for a MEASA city.” That’s the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, for you incognoscenti. –Patrick