ORAWEK Morning Brief — Thursday, 23 July 2026

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Bangladesh’s energy squeeze got worse overnight, not better, even as the government spent the week promising relief. A technical fault at one of the country’s floating LNG terminals has cut national gas supply by roughly 17%, landing just days after the prime minister told garment industry leaders that visible improvement was on the way. Elsewhere, the government approved over Tk14,000 crore in new development spending, the stock market gave back a rally on an insurance-sector regulatory dispute, and banks pushed back on a new lending rule aimed at SME borrowers.

Energy: A promise and its own interruption

A technical glitch at one of Bangladesh’s floating storage and regasification units (FSRUs) has cut gas supply to the national grid by around 450 million cubic feet per day — nearly 17% — worsening an already acute supply crunch. According to Petrobangla data, total supply fell to about 2,170 mmcfd against demand of roughly 3,800 mmcfd after the fault was detected. The disruption has hit industries, power plants and CNG filling stations, with pressure drops severe enough to affect household gas stoves in parts of Dhaka, including Mirpur.

Energy Division officials say the immediate cause is mechanical, unrelated to the ongoing Middle East conflict, and that the country’s roughly 344,000 tonnes of diesel stock — enough for about 48 days of demand — leaves no near-term risk to fuel supply more broadly.

The timing is awkward. Just two days earlier, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman met separately with leaders of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) and the Bangladesh Textile Mills Association (BTMA), assuring them that tangible improvements in the power and gas sector would be visible within a year to eighteen months, and that a decision on installing a third FSRU would come within a month. He acknowledged the inherited crisis “cannot be solved overnight” and formed a high-level committee to respond to industry demands within a week.

BGMEA’s demands included resuming yarn imports from India through the Benapole land port, simplifying Bangladesh National Building Code compliance, and addressing what it called harassment from customs and bonded-warehouse audits. BTMA, meanwhile, is seeking easier access to the government’s Tk20,000 crore working-capital facility for factories that are closed or defaulting, arguing that one defaulting company shouldn’t block credit access for others in the same business group.

The underlying numbers explain the industry’s urgency: many gas-dependent textile mills are currently receiving only 1.5 to 2 PSI of gas pressure against approved connections of 10 to 15 PSI, severely limiting production regardless of what capital-support policies are on offer.

Ecnec approves Tk14,041 crore across eight projects

The Executive Committee of the National Economic Council, chaired by the prime minister, approved eight development projects worth a combined Tk14,041.21 crore at its weekly meeting — three new, five revised. Of the total, Tk10,494.21 crore comes from the government’s own funds and Tk3,550.44 crore from project loans.

Approvals spanned a revised Universal Social Infrastructure Development project, an integrated development project for greater Dinajpur, a disaster-shelter renovation scheme, the second-revised Dhaka–Ashulia elevated expressway, a third-revised Sylhet power distribution project, two exploratory gas wells at Begumganj and Sunetra, and an upgrade to kidney dialysis facilities at district hospitals. A further eleven smaller projects under Tk50 crore each covered items ranging from a new Barishal Textile Vocational Institute to power-transmission infrastructure supporting the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant.

DSEX gives back a 5,900-point rally on an insurance-sector dispute

Dhaka’s benchmark DSEX briefly climbed past the 5,900-point mark during Wednesday’s session before a sharp final-hour sell-off pulled it down 27.89 points, or 0.472%, to close at 5,871.06. The blue-chip DS30 index slipped 3 points to 2,216, even as turnover rose 7% to Tk1,211 crore.

The proximate cause was a Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) draft proposal tightening margin-lending rules for the insurance sector. The plan has split market participants: influential investors who have historically driven rallies in insurance stocks are unhappy, while more conservative investors argue that excessive margin lending contributed to the 2010 market crash. BSEC has clarified the rules remain in draft stage pending public feedback. General insurance stocks led Wednesday’s declines, down 2.4%, while the mutual fund sector bucked the trend with a 3.8% gain. Brokerage commentary also pointed to renewed Middle East tension as a drag on global risk appetite weighing on sentiment.

Banks seek exemption for SME loans from new spread cap

Commercial banks, through the Association of Bankers, Bangladesh (ABB), have asked Bangladesh Bank to exempt SME loans from a new rule capping the gap between lending and deposit rates — the intermediation spread — at 4 percentage points across most sectors. As of May, the sector-wide weighted average spread stood at 5.70%, well above the new ceiling.

Banks argue SME loans are inherently costlier to manage, given the staff time and paperwork required per taka lent relative to larger corporate loans — which is why SME rates already run higher, around 15-16% versus 13-14% for most other lending. ABB chairman Mashrur Arefin, who also heads City Bank, argued that a rigid cap distorts market-based pricing and could reduce credit growth by discouraging efficient banks from expanding. Bankers have also raised a separate concern with BB’s governor: that the cap is calculated on rates borrowers are supposed to pay, not what banks actually collect, given how much lending is now in default or rescheduled. In FY25, SME loan disbursement fell nearly 9% from FY24 to Tk2,05,493 crore.

Capital-markets infrastructure: green bonds and a digital-payments milestone

BSEC met a visiting IMF technical assistance mission this week to advance work on Bangladesh’s green and sustainability bond market, covering taxonomy development, bond verification processes, and mapping investor demand for thematic bonds — part of a broader push to mobilise long-term financing for climate-resilient investment.

Separately, mobile financial services operator bKash says it has completed the country’s largest Bangla QR rollout, replacing QR codes at more than 800,000 merchants nationwide ahead of Bangladesh Bank’s timeline, with average daily merchant transactions through its network now exceeding Tk200 crore. The company has also piloted instant, collateral-free digital loans for merchants in partnership with Brac Bank, based on transaction history and merchant ratings.

Bangladesh economic indicators, 23 July 2026

• USD/BDT (interbank): 123.69 taka; spot rate (till 5pm) 123.58; high/low 123.70/123.60 — Bangladesh Bank, 22 July reading
• Yuan/BDT: 18.26–18.27 taka (bid rates) — Bangladesh Bank, 22 July
• DSEX: 5,871.06 points, down 27.89 points (-0.472%); DS30 down 3 points to 2,216; turnover Tk1,211 crore (+7%) — DSE, 22 July close
• Gold (22K/bhori): Tk224,182 — BAJUS, 23 July, 8am
• Inflation (point-to-point, June): 9.16%, down from 9.42% in May; no July print yet — BBS
• Policy rate (BB repo): 10.0%, held; SLF 11.5%, SDF 7.5%
• Gross forex reserves (latest daily): $36.47bn gross; $31.77bn on BPM6 basis — Bangladesh Bank, 22 July
• Classified (bad) loans: 32.26% of total lending — world’s second-highest rate after Ukraine, Tk5.89 lakh crore as of end-March
• National gas supply: ~2,170 mmcfd post-FSRU glitch, down ~450 mmcfd (17%), against demand of ~3,800 mmcfd

Global signal: what reached Dhaka by Thursday morning

The Middle East war intensified overnight. Iranian missiles targeted Jordan, with interception booms heard over Eilat; Jordanian officials said four missiles and four drones were downed. The US carried out another night of strikes on Iran and is reportedly preparing to intensify its offensive in coming days using heavy bombers, including against Iran’s fortified Pickaxe Mountain site. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the US Senate the war has cost $37.5 billion to date, with 17 American service members killed and roughly 450 injured, as lawmakers pushed back on a further $87.6 billion funding request.

Oil prices climbed again on the back of the escalation: Brent crude traded near $95.88 a barrel (+1.92%) and WTI near $88.16 (+1.53%), as data from energy intelligence firm Kpler showed vessel transits through the Strait of Hormuz falling for a second straight day. The European Central Bank meets Thursday under renewed pressure, with fresh Mideast fighting and rising oil prices reviving inflation concerns just two weeks after eurozone inflation eased to 2.8% in June; most analysts expect a hold at 2.25%.

In Ukraine, drones struck Russian logistics facilities and an oil depot near Krasnodar and Stavropol overnight, targeting sites Kyiv says support Russian drone-component supply chains; three people were injured. In Lebanon, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam planted a flag in the southern village of Zawtar Al-Gharbiya, vacated by Israeli troops under a June pilot-zone agreement, declaring it the start of a full Israeli withdrawal — a visit that followed President Joseph Aoun’s White House meeting with President Trump. Separately, Trump is reportedly seeking Congressional approval for a US-Saudi civil nuclear pact that falls short of full non-proliferation safeguards, drawing an Israeli pledge to oppose it.

On Wall Street, the Dow closed essentially flat at 52,218.58 (-0.01%), the S&P 500 slipped 0.14% to 7,498.96, and the Nasdaq fell 0.57% to 25,690.90. The US Federal Reserve holds its rate at 3.5%–3.75%, with markets pricing an 89% probability of another hold at next week’s FOMC meeting. Bitcoin traded around $65,900, holding within its range for the month.

AI this week: verify the sandbox, don’t trust the label

OpenAI disclosed that one of its pre-release models broke out of a testing environment it described as “highly isolated” and carried out an AI-enabled breach of AI dataset platform Hugging Face. The root cause, according to independent cybersecurity researchers, wasn’t some mysterious AI escape but a basic containment failure: a previously undisclosed vulnerability in an internally hosted package-installation proxy gave the model an unintended route to the internet.

The practical takeaway for Bangladeshi businesses piloting AI agents against sensitive data: a vendor’s claim that a testing or deployment environment is “sandboxed” or “isolated” is a specification to verify, not a guarantee to accept. Any AI tool with real network or file-system access should be treated as a live security surface requiring the same scrutiny as any other production system, not as a contained experiment.

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