The Simpsons presaged America’s Morsi Moment. Donald Trump is president-elect of the United States, and any pundit who chooses to pontificate this morning about what that means for America, for the global economy, for the Middle East or for Egypt is, simply, full of [redacted]. (H/t Taymour H. for the Morsi Moment reference. And yes, the Simpsons really did foreshadow that Winter is Coming, if not quite 16 years ago as the image above suggests. Tap the image above for the bit on the handover from the Trump Administration to the Lisa Simpson Whitehouse, or tap here for a bit last year making fun of Trump’s candidacy.)

We’ve worn our politics on our sleeves on this one. We’re too tired of it all to even crack a decent joke that this election was the equivalent of Mortada Mansour beating Suzanne Mubarak in a head-to-head contest. And so it was that in conversations with readers and friends yesterday about how Trump managed to pull off the political upset of the post-1945 US political order, we came back not to the failure of our colleagues in the media or to the difficulty of liking Sec. Clinton as a “candidate” as opposed to as a “policy genius,” but to this piece we ran in our 5 August 2015 Weekend Edition, when pundits said Trump’s campaign was dead in the water:

“This is why Trump will win: Donald Trump is cratering. His campaign is in disarray. He’s alienating veterans. Trailing Hillary by 15 points. The GOP will dump him by September and focus on congressional races. And yet he could still win. He equaled Hillary Clinton in fundraising in July, and he’s got a base of support that could care less what he steps in between now and election day — he is, as Clint Eastwood suggested this week, just saying what “a lot of folks” are thinking. Those folks: Poor whites. If you really want to understand why Trump could become president, you need to read the American Conservative’s “Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People.”

What does all this mean for Egypt? We’d be the same full-of-it pundits we warn against if we said we knew. In this, the EGX30 speaks for us: The benchmark nosedived in parallel with global markets at yesterday’s opening bell, but powered back to close up 1.3% with EGP 1.9 bn in turnover (more than 4x the trailing 90-day average) and foreign investors once again strong net buyers. (Tangentially: That matches with what the investor relations community is telling us: Investors are asking much less about the macro backdrop, and instead actively probing into company fundamentals and when to buy in.)

We do know this: President Abdel Fattah El Sisi had a meeting of the minds with Trump when the two sat down together in New York, and the president was the first world leader to call Trump yesterday to offer his congratulations. Egyptian MPs similarly have no problem with Trump, Ahram Online reports. Reuters left Egypt out of the mix when it sat down to look at how the Arab world is considering the Trump White House (it inexplicable substituted Turkey, leaving Egypt to the “Sisi calls first” piece), and Mohamed El Erian — our favourite Egyptian in the US of A — is exactly on-point with his economic advice to Trump in yesterday’s Financial Times. Also worth a read on Trump’s victory:

• Foreign policy: Donald Trump’s Victory Promises to Upend the International Order (New York Times)
• The Fed: Fed faces Trump glare ahead of policy shake-up (Financial Times)
• Who’s in charge: The WSJ introduces you to the new power players in “Donald Trump Transition Team Planning First Months in Office”
• Everything: The entire front page of Politico, maybe starting with “11 questions for President-elect Donald Trump”

The bottom line: Trump is a sideshow in Egypt (for now, at least). We have much more pressing issues with which to grapple, starting with the health of the interbank market for FX and how far the EGP has to overshoot to hit a market-clearing rate. Heading into this week, two concerns were high on our minds when it came to the float: Do dealing rooms have the experience — and professionalism — to run a free market for FX? And what, exactly, would be a market-clearing rate for the EGP?

Check-ins with our favourite bankers yesterday gave us heart. “It was definitely an open question whether the dealing rooms could work together, whether they knew what to do in this situation,” one told us. “But there’s definitely dialogue going on — there’s two-way communications between multiple market players, and you see that in the USD cooling to EGP 16.90 today.” The bottom line: This week has been about confidence-building, and insiders that’s in progress.

How far does the EGP have to overshoot to hit a market-clearing rate? Probably around 19.25 is the consensus of our (highly unscientific) straw poll. “The rate probably has to overshoot to lure-in those who bought USD at the peak — the people who bought at 17-18 and are waiting for it to recover. When we hit 18-19 or a bit north, you should start seeing an influx of USD from people have been made whole. When nobody has lost money, that’s when it takes off.” And by takes off: We mean, “The rate slides down to something more reasonable.”

How long should that take? Estimates varied between three weeks and 2-3 months based on the rate at which USD is flowing into banks, and our gut says something closer to 2-3 months is more realistic. And FCY liquidity is definitely entering the system. One banker tells us that inflows from clients fell 90% from their pre-2011 peak after the events of 25 January — and then by 75% again when Mohammed Morsi was elected. Volumes recovered to 2011 levels after 30 June 2013 before drying up almost entirely this year. Inflows in the past four days were perhaps 3x what they were on any day last year.

The next step: Provided the CBE leaves the float in place, banks will likely start opening letters of credit at an accelerated pace in the week to come as they continue to chip away at the backlog.

The Trade and Industry Minister is scheduled to host a conference today to discuss industrial and export-development strategies through 2020, according to an e-mailed statement. Major national business associations will attend as will MPs, the European Union and others.