ORAWEK ভোরের সংক্ষেপ — The Morning Brief for Dhaka’s business, finance, and policy professionals. Free forever, every weekday at 8:00 AM.

A Trade Gap That’s Growing Faster Than Exports

Bangladesh’s trade deficit widened to $2.09 billion in July, the first month of the current fiscal year, as petroleum and fertiliser import bills surged even while exports slipped. According to balance-of-payments data released by Bangladesh Bank, imports grew 8.6% year-on-year in July while exports fell 1.9% — petroleum product imports alone jumped more than 83% to $1.37 billion, and fertiliser import costs rose 50% to $187 million.

The current account stayed narrowly positive, at $64 million, down from $125 million a year earlier — propped up almost entirely by a 15.4% year-on-year jump in remittances to $2.86 billion. Economists caution against reading too much into a single month’s data, but the direction is unmistakable: import costs are climbing faster than export earnings can offset them.

That widening gap arrived alongside a second warning sign. Bangladesh’s composite Purchasing Managers’ Index fell 7.9 points in August to 49.9, tipping the overall reading into contraction territory for the first time in several months. Manufacturing took the sharpest hit, down 18 points to 47.4, as respondents cited difficulty accessing bank financing, ongoing electricity and gas shortages, and softer garment-sector orders. Services contracted for the first time in 22 months. Agriculture and construction were the lone bright spots, both expanding.

A third data point rounds out the picture: banks’ provisioning shortfall against bad loans has crossed Tk2.22 trillion, up from Tk1.91 trillion just six months earlier, as non-performing loans climbed to Tk6.06 trillion. Bangladesh Bank has asked the finance ministry to fast-track the proposed Distressed Asset Management Act 2026, which would create a formal market for buying and selling bad loans.

It isn’t all downside. Gross foreign exchange reserves have climbed to $36.44 billion as of 8 September — up 46.6% over two years — on the back of stronger remittance inflows and steady central bank dollar purchases. Bangladesh Bank also told parliament this week that 1,210MW of new capacity, including the resumption of the 660MW Rampal plant, is expected to reach the national grid within days.

The read for professionals: reserves and remittances are genuinely strong, and the September repo rate cut to 9.5% eases the cost of borrowing. But the PMI contraction and widening trade gap say the underlying economy hasn’t found its footing — and with global oil prices climbing on the Strait of Hormuz standoff (more below), July’s import cost shock looks more like a preview than a peak.

Economy Watch: The Numbers That Matter Today

Bangladesh Bank’s exchange rate portal typically runs one to two days behind live market activity, so treat the USD/BDT and Yuan/BDT figures above as the latest officially published readings rather than this-minute spot rates.

Global Signal: The Hormuz Standoff Is Back at the Center of Everything

The story overshadowing global energy markets this week is the escalating standoff at the Strait of Hormuz. The United States struck three Iranian oil tankers on 5 September; Iran responded by firing a ballistic missile at two US Navy warships and has since moved to establish a new Hormuz shipping corridor that would require vessels to coordinate passage with Tehran. Brent crude is trading near $98.60 a barrel and WTI near $93.56 — both close to three-month highs — after a fresh strike on Saudi Aramco’s Jizan refining facility added to supply concerns.

For Bangladesh, this is not an abstract geopolitical story. Bangladesh’s state minister for power and energy told parliament this week that the government has already paid an extra Tk15,350 crore for LNG purchased on the spot market this year because of Middle East-driven price spikes. Every additional dollar on Brent adds directly to a petroleum import bill that was already up 83% year-on-year in July.

Elsewhere: Wall Street closed lower on 8 September (Dow -1.18%, S&P 500 -0.58%, Nasdaq -0.32%) in a broad risk-off session tied to oil and rate uncertainty — worth watching for RMG exporters ahead of the US holiday ordering season. The US Federal Reserve’s benchmark rate remains steady at 3.50%–3.75% since December’s cut. Bitcoin is trading around $78,700, down modestly and still stuck below the $80,000 mark.

On the diplomatic front, Israel says it will restrict British consulate access in East Jerusalem after the UK, France, and Canada sanctioned West Bank settlements and banned imports from them — a sign of a widening rift between Israel and Western governments that is worth tracking for its knock-on effects on Gulf remittance-corridor stability, even though Bangladesh has no direct trade exposure to Israel. Gaza’s October 2025 ceasefire continues to hold only nominally, with disarmament and governance handover stalled. In Ukraine, Russia has pushed back its self-imposed deadline to capture the Donbas region to March 2027 — the fifteenth such delay — even as Kyiv says a trilateral US-Russia-Ukraine summit could happen as early as 20 September. A prolonged war keeps global fertiliser and grain prices elevated, which matters directly to Bangladesh given that fertiliser import costs are already up 50% year-on-year.

AI This Week: Someone May Be Spending Your Claude Subscription For You

Anthropic has confirmed that a wave of infostealer malware is being used to hijack Claude login sessions and quietly consume victims’ token allowances. In one documented case, a user’s Claude Max subscription burned through its full usage limit on three consecutive days without him running any tasks; another user reported usage jumping from 0% to 100% in roughly twelve minutes. Because account support currently tracks only total usage rather than an itemised breakdown, this kind of theft can go undetected for weeks or months.

For Dhaka teams increasingly running accounting, purchase-order, or email automation through AI agents, the practical move is straightforward: rotate session credentials on a regular schedule, avoid running AI tooling on shared or unverified machines, and check usage dashboards routinely for spikes that don’t match your own activity. This is exactly the kind of quiet operational risk that hits small, AI-dependent operations hardest — not because the AI itself is unsafe, but because credential hygiene hasn’t caught up with how central these tools have become to daily workflows.

ORAWEK Note

Some mornings the data argues with itself, and today is one of them. Reserves at a two-year high, remittances up 15% — and in the same set of numbers, the PMI tips into contraction and the trade gap widens. I used to think a “good” or “bad” economic morning was one thing. It’s rarely that clean. The discipline is in reading both signals at once, not picking the one that fits the mood you woke up in.

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ORAWEK ভোরের সংক্ষেপ is a free, independent morning digest covering business, economy, and AI for Bangladesh’s professionals. Published every weekday at 8:00 AM. No spam, ever.