The rout in global markets continues this morning: The EGX followed the Friday lead of global markets, with the EGX30 closing down 1.4% yesterday in light trading. Just about every regional exchange, from the UAE and Saudi Arabia to Kuwait and Qatar, also closed in the red yesterday. Just about every Asian market was (rather steeply) following suit as we dispatched today, with the lone market showing green on our dashboard at dispatch time: Pakistan, up 0.1%.

Bloomberg has proclaimed it the “biggest selloff for global stocks in two years” and quotes one strategist as suggesting the “pullback has farther to go … [but] is likely to be just an overdue correction, with say a 10% or so fall, rather than a severe bear market.”

It’s PMI day: The Emirates NBD Egypt purchasing managers’ index for January will be announced today and based on last month’s results, we’re reasonably optimistic. Gauges for the UAE and Saudi Arabia are also due out today.

The House Local Administration Committee is expected to discuss today two draft laws regulating shops in public spaces and governing procedures for the operation and management of shops, Al Mal reports. Also on the committee’s agenda: Proposed amendments to the Public Roads Act that would impose a licensing fee of EGP 10,000 on food trucks and carts. The Ismail Cabinet signed off on the amendments in July 2016.

Hope springs eternal, huh? A Turkish trade delegation to Egypt will be attending the Egyptian-Turkish Business Forum today, according to Yenisafak. The forum is organized by Federation of Egyptian Chambers of Commerce and the delegation consists of “10 high-level entrepreneurs” including members of Turkey’s Union of Chambers. Trade and Industry Minister Tarek Kabil has invited Turkish businessmen to look into investing in auto assembly projects once the Automotive Directive is passed into law, Al Shorouk reports.

The Abraaj Group is out with a strong statement on the deployment of funds called from limited partners in its Abraaj Growth Markets Health Fund in answer to a Wall Street Journal report over the weekend that four top LPs had demanded an external investigation into where the money went if it hadn’t been deployed in investments. The firm dismissed the media reports as “inaccurate and misleading” and, as we suggested in this space yesterday was likely the case, noted that, “Given the lack of mature healthcare assets in growth markets and the need to develop greenfield as well as brownfield projects, capital deployment is less predictable than that of a standard private equity fund. …Some capital was not used as quickly as anticipated due to unforeseen political and regulatory developments” in several markets. Investors were told about these delays “through quarterly general partner reports and other investor communications,” the statement added.Bloomberg has coverage, and you can read Abraaj’s statement in full (pdf) here.

Look for policy stability in our northern neighbor: Cyprus, a key ally in Egypt’s quest to become a regional energy hub, re-elected 71-year old president Nicos Anastasiades, who comfortably won yesterday’s runoff election with 56% of the vote. He faced an independent rival backed by the Communist Party. Deutsche Welle and the WSJ have coverage.

In miscellany worthy of your attention this morning:

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the hardest places in the world to collect unpaid debts, according to research from insurer Euler Hermes in its annual survey on debt collection. The FT has more.

European bankers are leading the global charge against tech firms from the US and China set on eating the industry’s lunch. “Big Tech’s move into banking is threatening financial stability and the biggest US and Chinese technology groups should be subject to some of the same regulation as big banks, according to top European finance chiefs,” the FT reports.

Speaking of the salmon-colored paper, the “Hillbilly elegist” who explained why Trump got elected has lunch with the FT.

Egyptians may like Kenya right now as a natural export market, but the same can’t be said of the New York Times, which reports that just months after being hailed as a democracy, “the most widely watched television stations in Kenya are shuttered, and the government has defied a court order to return them to the air. Opposition politicians are under arrest, and journalists have also been threatened with jail.”

Forgive the bleary-eyed Americans in your lives this morning. They were likely awake until 5:20am-ish watching the Super Bowl, which saw the Philadelphia Eagles defeat the New England Patriots 41-33. It is Philadelphia’s first-ever Super Bowl win.

Today was a good day: A poem, written last year by an eleventh grader in Brooklyn, NY, has gone viral after being posted in a London bar. Read it backward—image below.

Finally, look the mercury to peak at 28°C today in Cairo before rising to north of 30°C on Wednesday as we look ahead to an unseasonably warm weekend.