Two questions are preoccupying us this morning as we settle into the week:

• How much are we going to have to pay under the 0.25% levy on revenue the government is imposing on the private sector to fund a new national healthcare system?
• Is Uber being blocked in Egypt?

We look at both questions in this morning’s Speed Round, below.

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron is in Cairo today to meet President Abdel Fattah El Sisi. Macron visited Upper Egypt yesterday. Look for economic ties, regional cooperation, migration and the war against terror to feature on the agenda. Again, we have more in Speed Round, below.

The EGX led Mideast shares higher yesterday on news that telecom giant Veon is looking to take private the EGX-listed emerging markets telecom operator Global Telecom Holding, which has operations in Algeria, Bangladesh and Pakistan, Bloomberg notes. “Egypt is finally catching up with the risk-off trade emerging markets are witnessing,” EFG Hermes’ senior macro strategy analyst Mohammed al-Hajj told Reuters. More on that, too, in Speed Round, below.

But EM inflows remain weak, the IIF says: Investors are continuing to avoid making new investments in EM assets outside of China, according to a report from the Institute of International Finance (IIF). The institute says that EMs — including key economies such as India and South Africa — have failed to see a healthy rebound of inflows following the 2018 market sell-off.

But 2019 may not be hideous: Overall market sentiment is positive, the IIF says, writing that anecdotes abound for a recovery in EM non-resident portfolio flows. “Against the backdrop of the violent EM sell-off last year… the combination of solid growth and a cautious Fed should be positive for risk assets,” they write.

Read that against two of the best “2019 will be a bad year” stories that we’ve seen this month,both published yesterday in the Financial Times:

Will we see a rerun of a market meltdown, just like in 2016?The story makes it clear to us all that our fate this year rests heavily on US and Chinese macroeconomic policies and the prospects of a trade war. And unlike in 2016, when a similar basket of factors “unleashed a major extension of the equity bull market,” it’s not likely this time around. We may not be heading for a “global recession and major bear market” right now, but we’re equally unlikely to see a “return of the golden period that followed 2016.”

Another tech bubble could be about to burst, Rana Foroohar warns in the salmon-colored paper, likening what’s happening today in Big Tech to the dotcom boom and bust at the turn of the century. “Then, as now, we were at the late stages of a credit cycle, with too much money chasing too little value. And then, like now, investors were counting on a spate of hot IPOs to pour a little more kerosene on markets that were clearly over-inflated.” Her concerns are very developed-market-focused, but worth reading even here in EM.

Global tech news is blowing up our newsfeed. Among the highlights and lowlights:

• Facebook is going to somehow integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, according to the New York Times. Even if that’s on the back end, the implications for user privacy are … mildly concerning?
• Big guns going after Slack ahead of its IPO: Workplace messaging app Slack is facing a narrower “window of opportunity,” Richard Waters writes for the FT, raising concerns that service (which happens to power conversations here at Enterprise) faces headwinds from Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts.
• Apple will report its earnings tomorrow, and the Wall Street Journal thinks the road ahead for our favorite tech company is rockier than it would first appear after it recently re-stated its guidance.
• Seven lessons from Generation Z for surviving in a tech-obsessed world, per Christopher Mims in the Wall Street Journal. (For those keeping score, Gen Z are kids born 1996 onward.)

Want to head back to graduate school? We’re not sure we’d be doing an MBA if we were turning back the hands of time — synthetic biology or computer science would be more lucrative, an MFA more emotionally satisfying — but if biz school is your bag, the FT has got you covered with its FT Global MBA ranking 2019. The top five schools:

• Stanford (US)
• Harvard (US)
• Insead (France)
• Wharton (US)
• Ceibs (China)

Check out the landing page for the package or skip straight to the rankings.