It’s a two-story news day, folks, as the business community absorbs both the arrest of would-be presidential candidate Sami Anan on charges he violated military law and the release yesterday of the IMF’s glowing report on the Ismail government’s reform agenda. Also worth your attention this morning is news of what the Investment Ministry is positioning as a sweeping (and imminent) overhaul of the Companies Act. We have more on all three stories in today’s Speed Round, below.

We can all digest the news tomorrow as we mark a national holiday. Banks and the stock exchange will be closed in observance of 25 January. Enjoy the break — our next long weekend isn’t until April, folks. Enterprise is off tomorrow, but we’ll be back first thing Sunday morning.

As we slide into the long weekend, we are grateful for: Challenging conversations with good, smart friends. Great coffee. Winter weather in Egypt. The challenge of lifting heavy things (mentally and physically). The prospect of three uninterrupted days with the people we love the most. How about you? Drop us a line at editorial@enterprise.press and we’ll run some of the best answers next Thursday—and, if things go well, every Thursday thereafter.

Further afield, the party continues in Davos, where CEOs from the finance industry report that “the party is really good.” (Yes, that’s a direct quote. Even CEOs are finance bros at heart.) Bosses of major institutions including Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and Credit Susie’s Tidjane Thiam said they were bullish on the outlook for the global economy, with the FT quoting them as suggesting “the risk of global markets unravelling in the face of geopolitical risks is overstated.” Or as Schwarzman put it: “It’s a time of enormous ebullience, part of which was created by really good economic growth.” Speaking metaphorically (we think), he added that while there is the risk of a reckoning, “The party is really so good, they’re serving really good food and drink, you are making money and it’s really not hard.” Cheers, Steve.

Or is it? As the Wall Street Journal reports, there is a “strong awareness” in Davos this year that “geopolitical risks — including that of a potential conflict with nuclear-armed North Korea and a U.S. trade war with China — aren’t being adequately reflected in financial-asset prices.”

Also from Davos: What we’ve been doing here in Egypt since 2011 has a new name: Blended finance, and it’s a USD 50 bn global market right now. Blended finance, Bloomberg tells us, is when private capital is pooled with public funds to invest in projects that serve development goals spanning everything from infrastructure and clean energy to climate change to poverty alleviation. The story singles out a Chilean wind farm as its example, but we’re going to go out on a limb here and say that Egypt and our friends at (primarily European) DFIs should have been the poster children. Well before the events of 2011, Qalaa Holdings (then known as Citadel Capital) pioneered the space, mobilizing bns in equity and debt from private investors, development finance institutions and export credit agencies for its USD 3.7 bn Egyptian Refining Company. Basel El Baz is doing the same with Caron Holdings’ USD 10 bn Tahrir Petrochemical Complex. And everyone working in renewable energy here — from wind to the megaproject that is solar power in Benban — is following the same playbook.

Bloomberg’s story was spurred by the release of a report by the Blended Finance Taskforce. Their website is here, for those of you so inclined.

The prospect of Cape Town becoming the world’s first big metropolis to run out of water has crossed into the global press. Picking up where Toronto’s Globe and Mail left off earlier this week, the story made it yesterday to the Financial Times. It is absolutely a must read if you, like us, are concerned about Egypt’s approach to water conservation, from how we export it (think: rice), misuse it (washing our cars daily) to the prospect of what happened when GERD is fully up and running. There but for the grace of God, as our grandma would say.

Also in the salmon-coloured paper: Is there a risk that private equity is getting into bubble territory as competition and valuations increase? That was the subject of the FT’s Big Read yesterday, which notes that “buyout groups are not only setting new records for fundraising, they are also turning money away at their fastest ever rate.”

**PSA- As unabashed fans of the paper, we want to draw high school teachers’ attention to the fact that the Financial Times is offering students aged 16-19 access to its website without charge. The FT started the initiative in 1,400 secondary schools in the UK and is now extending it worldwide. Interested schools can register here.