…and we’re back: Welcome back to reality, ladies and gents. It was a shockingly news-filled Eid Al-Adha break. As you’ll read below in this morning’s edition: President Abdel Fattah El Sisi ratified the value-added tax, Amr El Garhy appears to have raised all of the funds we need to unlock the first tranche of the IMF funding (provided the executive board passes the agreement this month…), and the ergot flap hasn’t just cut us off from the global wheat market — it’s also cost Egyptian fruit and vegetable exporters their access to Russia. And that’s just for starters.

And as you’ll read in What We’re Tracking This Week, it doesn’t look like the newsflow is going to slow down this week. The first day of fall may not be until Thursday, but so far as we’re concerned, summer ended this past weekend.

Oh, and Thursday marked the eight-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman and the start of the Great Recession.We marked the occasion by reading a meditation on its meaning from the Financial Times’ John Authers. We’re also re-reading Too Big To Fail to mark the occasion and confess to having watched The Big Short again this weekend after it hit Egyptian Netflix.