Briefings draw the themes that span borders — security architectures, chokepoints, constitutional fragility — out of the daily country monitor and anchor them to our published base rates.
Four very different governments tightened the rules on moving money out this year. The playbook was the same every time, and it is readable in advance.
In 2026, Indonesia halved the amount of foreign currency an individual can buy each month, Congo's central bank moved to take sole control of foreign banknotes entering the country, Iraq trimmed what travellers can carry as its currency hit a multi-year low, and Iran rationed foreign exchange under war conditions. Four governments, four situations, one instrument: restricting how money leaves. The measures arrive quietly, framed as paperwork, and they follow a recognisable sequence. For anyone responsible for a company's money in these markets, the sequence is the early warning, and the cost of moving early is a spread while the cost of moving late is a queue.
A month ago we published 560 predictions and promised to mark them against what actually happened, in public, whatever the result. Here are the marks.
In June we published 560 predictions across 35 countries. In July we checked them against what actually happened. On questions about year-level conditions, such as whether a country's inflation stays above crisis levels, we did slightly better than someone who simply quoted history. On the strict 30-day questions, nothing on our list happened during the month, so the only thing that month could measure was our false alarms. We are publishing all of it, including the parts that flatter no one, and some marks will change as slower official data arrives. Every change will be logged here.
Lebanon fought a four-month war, lost a large share of its workforce, and nearly lost its power grid. The pound never moved. Here is why, and what it cost.
Through four months of war, Lebanon's pound held near 89,500 to the dollar, the same rate as before the first strike. That was not luck and it was not confidence. The central bank defended the rate by starving the market of the local currency speculators would need to attack it, and by spending reserves it cannot easily replace, over a hundred million dollars in the first half of July alone. The defence worked, but a stable exchange rate is not a healthy economy: a large share of the private workforce lost work and the country still cannot pay its debts. For anyone with money or operations in Lebanon, the number worth reading is the cost of the defence, and it is published every two weeks.
Lebanon is climbing out of a war while Iran falls back into one, and both roads run through Baghdad before 30 September
The region's risk did not go up or down this month. It moved. Lebanon's ceasefire, dismissed as dead within 48 hours of signature, has held for nearly a month, and the country is starting the long climb out. Iran's truce with the United States collapsed on 9 July into the heaviest strike exchange since February, with a leadership succession running underneath it. Iraq now sits between them with two deadlines landing on the same day, 30 September: the final American withdrawal and the disarmament of the militias. Israel carries the region's military tempo while its diplomatic position erodes faster than its security one. Anyone planning the next quarter should plan for the risk map they will face in October, not the one from June.
A town split by the border is being bombed on both halves, and Chad is being pulled toward a war it did not choose
Tine is one town with a border running through it: half in Sudan's Darfur, half in Chad. Since February, drones from Sudan's civil war have been striking both halves. On 21 July a strike on a water point killed at least 21 civilians; since early February, medical teams on the Chadian side have treated more than 450 people wounded in cross-border attacks; in March a single strike inside Chad killed 17 mourners and prompted N'Djamena to close the border and threaten retaliation. This is how wars spread: by seepage rather than invasion, into a neighbour with far less capacity to absorb it. Chad now hosts over a million people fleeing Sudan while its own eastern towns come under fire, and the aid corridor that feeds Darfur runs directly through the strike zone.
A maritime chokepoint, a regional proxy network, and a domestic Iranian economy under simultaneous pressure
The MoU intended to halt US-Iran hostilities and lift the maritime blockade is being violated openly within days of signature. Violations are happening across three independent theatres at once, which makes the agreement materially harder to salvage and the chokepoint risk materially harder to price.
A constitutional rupture in Mogadishu, near-famine in Jonglei, and the imminent renewal of the Tigray war
The Horn of Africa is running three independent high-severity crises in parallel: constitutional fragmentation in Somalia, famine-level hunger signals in South Sudan, and renewed war risk in Tigray. Each would dominate regional attention on its own. They are happening at the same time, and the response capacity of the wider system is being consumed in ways the long-run base rates do not capture.
Capital-attack escalation, transitional mandates that no longer end, and the closing window for Western re-engagement
Across the central Sahel, Western security partners are withdrawing as jihadist pressure on the capitals themselves intensifies, and transitional juntas have quietly extended their mandates by years. The security architecture of 2013 to 2023 is gone, and what is replacing it is increasingly hostile to the assumptions external operators still build their security posture around.
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