ORAWEK — ভোরের সংক্ষেপ · The Morning Brief · Thursday, 24 September 2026

Bangladesh Bank chose to wait and watch this week, holding its policy rate steady while explicitly naming this week’s fuel-price hike and the new government pay scale as inflation risks it wants to see play out first. Elsewhere, a new settlement mechanism deepens the taka’s role in trade, Meta signals interest in a Dhaka presence, and a long-idle state oil terminal finally gets an operator.

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Top Story: A Rate Hold With a Clear Watch List

Bangladesh Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, chaired by Governor Md Mostaqur Rahman, decided at its 14th meeting on Wednesday to keep the policy rate unchanged, opting to assess the impact of domestic and global shocks on inflation and growth before making any further adjustment. The decision follows July’s 50-basis-point rate cut.

According to the meeting’s minutes, the MPC reviewed recent macroeconomic developments and observed a downward trend in headline inflation — though it remains above the government’s 7.50 percent target ceiling for FY27. The committee explicitly flagged two domestic developments as fresh inflation risks: the government’s late-September fuel-price increase, and implementation of the new national pay scale, both of which “could create additional inflationary pressures.” It also noted that international energy prices remain volatile due to the prolonged Middle East conflict. The MPC will closely monitor the effects of these developments on GDP growth and CPI before considering any further change to the policy rate — a cautious approach that balances containing inflation against supporting economic activity. The meeting was attended by Deputy Governor Dr Md Habibur Rahman, economist Dr Mustafa K Mujeri, BIDS Director General Dr A K Enamul Haque, and other senior officials.

Source: The Financial Express — Bangladesh Bank keeps policy rate unchanged

A New Route for Settling Trade in Taka

Separately, Bangladesh Bank introduced a framework allowing eligible cross-border trade payments to be settled in taka through Non-Resident Taka (vostro) accounts maintained by authorised dealer banks for correspondent banks in partner countries. The key change: eligible import payments can now create taka balances in these accounts without requiring an initial inward remittance in a freely convertible currency, as the previous system required.

In practice, a Bangladeshi exporter’s dollar-denominated invoice — say, $1 million for a garment shipment — can still be written in dollars; only the actual settlement converts to taka at the prevailing exchange rate. Surplus taka balances left in vostro accounts can now go toward permitted investments, including foreign direct investment, foreign portfolio investment, alternative investment funds, and open-end mutual funds. Exporters paid this way keep their existing foreign-currency retention facilities, so they can still cover imported inputs or Export Development Fund loan repayments. The framework creates an additional settlement channel alongside the dollar system, potentially deepening the taka’s role in bilateral trade with suitable partner countries.

Source: TBS News — How will Bangladesh’s new cross-border trade settlement in taka work?

Meta Reviews a Dhaka Presence

Meta is interested in opening an office in Dhaka and will review when and how to establish a local presence, State Minister for Foreign Affairs Shama Obaed said following a meeting in New York during Bangladesh’s UN General Assembly delegation visit. “There has been a very good meeting with Meta… they are interested,” she told reporters, noting Bangladesh is Meta’s eighth-largest Facebook market — with a larger user base than India’s, according to the minister.

The discussion covered Bangladesh’s new Cyber Security Act, ways Meta could support digital-safety efforts, and the company’s interest in backing e-commerce and online-business expansion as well as working with educational institutions. Digital harassment mitigation was also discussed. Meta representatives reportedly appreciated the government’s emphasis on e-commerce and technology in the current national budget and expressed strong interest in closer collaboration with the Bangladesh team going forward.

Source: The Daily Star — Meta considers opening Dhaka office

A Long-Idle Oil Terminal Finally Gets an Operator

The Cabinet Committee on Government Purchase appointed Indonesian firm PT Pertamina Trans Kontinental as operations and maintenance contractor for the Single Point Mooring (SPM) — the offshore terminal built to unload oil from large tankers and pipe it directly to onshore storage — for a fee of nearly Tk1,950 crore. The appointment comes more than two years after construction was completed, following a period when the interim government could not decide on a contractor.

The SPM, Bangladesh’s first integrated offshore-onshore oil storage and transport system, was built in Maheshkhali, Cox’s Bazar, starting in August 2018, with construction finally completed in March 2024 after four deadline extensions pushed the cost from roughly Tk5,000 crore to Tk8,298 crore. Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation has already repaid Tk3,077 crore in loans for the project, with another Tk690 crore instalment due by December — despite the facility having sat unused. The 18-month contractor guarantee period for fixing technical faults has already expired. Analysts estimate the two-year operational delay alone cost Tk1,000 crore to Tk1,200 crore in lost savings. Once operational, the SPM will cut large-tanker unloading and transport time to roughly 48 hours, down from the current 11-day process using smaller lighterage vessels.

Source: The Daily Star — Govt appoints Indonesian firm to operate BPC’s Tk8,298cr SPM after 2yrs

NBR Uncovers a Cigarette-Material Import Scheme

NBR’s Central Intelligence Cell found that Unique Traders, a company that imported 3,63,000 kilograms of Cellulose Acetate Tow — a key cigarette-filter raw material — over the past year, does not appear to exist at its registered business address. A seizure of over 48,000 kilograms at Chattogram Customs directly involves more than Tk16 crore in revenue; NBR estimates that if the material had been manufactured into cigarettes and sold through illegal channels, the potential revenue at stake would be roughly Tk324 crore. The intelligence wing has identified four more companies with similarly unusual import volumes and no apparent real business activity, and investigations are ongoing.

Source: TBS News — Cigarette raw material imported in name of non-existent company

Economy Watch: The Numbers Behind the Story

Read the rate hold together with the MPC’s own language: Bangladesh Bank isn’t ruling out further easing — it is explicitly waiting to see how much of this week’s fuel hike and the new pay scale actually feed into consumer prices before moving again.

Global Signal: What Moved Overnight

Iran war status. Signals remain sharply mixed. President Trump warned on Tuesday that the US could “annihilate” Iran, even as he said his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had held what he called productive talks in New York with mediators representing Iran, adding “I think there’s a lot of momentum for them to make a deal.” For Bangladesh: markets are choosing to price in the possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough despite the continued tough rhetoric — worth watching closely, since either a deal or further escalation would move fuel costs materially in the coming days.

Strait of Hormuz and oil markets. Brent crude fell to $98.16/barrel (−1.1%) and WTI to $89.01/barrel (−1.67%) — the sixth consecutive declining session, pulling both benchmarks to roughly two-week lows. The move followed Saudi Arabia restarting its East-West Pipeline to the Red Sea on Tuesday, restoring around 4 million barrels per day of flow that had been rerouted since the pipeline was shut on 11 September after drone attacks Riyadh blamed on Iraqi militias. Saudi Arabia also offered more crude to Asian refiners from loading points outside the Strait of Hormuz, and Iraq’s oil minister said the country is exporting more than 3 million barrels per day, with plans to boost exports via Turkey past 600,000 bpd. Rising US crude inventories added further downward pressure. For Bangladesh: the clearest sign yet of easing global fuel-supply pressure — if the trend holds, it could finally offer some relief on the cost pressure behind this week’s domestic fuel-price hike.

Source: The Daily Star — Oil falls $1 on better supply outlook, hopes for US-Iran talks

Russia–Ukraine war. The war, now well past its 1,650th day, continues without a ceasefire: Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign has kept striking Russian oil refineries and energy infrastructure through September, part of a pattern that has pushed Russian refining capacity to its lowest level since 2002 and driven Moscow to extend its diesel export ban through 31 January 2027. Russian forces have continued near-daily missile, guided-bomb and drone strikes across Ukraine. Western officials, including figures within NATO, have repeatedly voiced concern this year that the conflict risks widening beyond Ukraine’s borders if not contained. For Bangladesh: this remains a live structural driver of the global diesel shortage sitting behind elevated fuel costs worldwide, layered on top of the Hormuz and Iran-war disruptions — a second, independent front keeping energy markets on edge even as Gulf supply eases.

Wall Street. The Dow traded at 51,602.81 (−0.50%), the S&P 500 at 7,714.82 (−0.64%), and the Nasdaq Composite at 26,949.65 (−1.08%) intraday on 23 September — a broad pullback. For Bangladesh: a risk-off session even as oil prices ease, suggesting investors remain cautious pending clearer signals from this week’s Trump-Xi meeting and the US-Iran diplomatic track.

Source: Google Finance — market data, 23 September 2026

AI This Week: Voice-Based Mobile AI Agents Meet a Mobile-First Bangladesh

OpenAI is bringing voice-based agentic features to the ChatGPT mobile app, letting Plus and Pro subscribers use their phone’s “Work” tab to draft documents, summarise emails or Slack messages, build simple websites, or create presentations — all by voice, without needing to switch to a desktop. Users can start a task on the go and pick it up later on a computer if needed; free and Go-tier users get access to plugins and connected apps instead of the full agentic feature set.

The timing is notable for Bangladesh specifically. Earlier this week, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics data showed that while 59.2 percent of Bangladeshis use the internet, only 11.8 percent use a computer — almost entirely because the population is overwhelmingly mobile-first. Voice-based mobile AI agents remove exactly the bottleneck that has been limiting AI-driven productivity gains for non-IT businesses and staff who never had regular desktop access to begin with.

Do this today: if your team has been holding off on rolling out AI tools because staff lack laptops, stop waiting on the hardware. Test whether a voice-driven mobile workflow — drafting replies, summarising meeting notes, prepping short reports — can already cover the bulk of the routine documentation work your staff do on their phones today.

Source: TechCrunch — ChatGPT mobile app gets voice-based agentic features

ORAWEK Note

Bangladesh Bank held rates today and basically said, out loud, “we’re watching the fuel hike before we move again.” That’s not indecision — that’s a central bank admitting it doesn’t fully control the biggest input into its own inflation number this quarter. Sometimes the most honest policy move is the one that says “not yet.”

— ORAWEK

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