The News, Connected

Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, the US military, the cartel takedowns, the dismantling of the corruption networks, and the IQD - read separately, they are noise. Read against a monetary system being rebuilt and re-backed, they are one operation.

Subscribe now to track it daily.

CBI Rate Alert Get an instant email on the day the official CBI revalues the IQD.
Free, no credit card.

Free. No credit card required. Want the alert only? Choose it in your welcome email.

"

My daily war news impacting world economics update, right here. You called it early on, great job!

Intelligence subscriber
"

The Daily Briefing is the highlight of my news day.

Daily Briefing subscriber
"

The most comprehensive information on Iraq and a currency revaluation on the planet. No guesswork. Just logic and facts. Worth every penny.

Direct Access subscriber

Iraq's 2027 Budget Enters Production

Drafting of the 2027 budget begins with the KRG seated at the table, while the CBI takes over a private bank. The paper that carries the new rate is in production.

Friday, September 4. Tomorrow morning, in a committee room at the Federal Ministry of Finance, Iraq starts writing its 2027 federal budget. A Kurdish lawmaker, Ghalib Mohammed, put the schedule on the record this week. Drafting begins Saturday. The finished draft reaches the Council of Ministers on September 15. About a month of amendments and approval follows, and then parliament votes.

Regular readers know why this desk treats that as the biggest moment of recent months. The exchange rate in Baghdad is not only a market number. It is written into law through the budget. The 1,300 every holder knows by heart has sat there since June 2023, because no government finished a successor document. Its replacement now has a start date, a submission date, and a committee working weekends.

And one more detail tells you how real it is. The Kurdistan Region did not wait for an invitation. Its senior financial delegation arrived in Baghdad on Thursday and took its seats on the High Budget Preparation Committee, the day before the first line gets written. Today's briefing covers what enters production tomorrow, who is at the table, and what the central bank did to the banking system while the calendar was being set.

Reset Intelligence / Research Desk

Your deep research analyst.

Put any question on the IQD, the RV or the reset to the RI research assistant. It answers in seconds and will conduct deep research to find you the answer.

Try the Research Assistant

The Production Schedule

Let's start with the dates, because for 3 years this file has run on rumors and it now runs on a calendar. Drafting opens tomorrow at the Finance Ministry. The draft reaches the Council of Ministers on September 15. Roughly a month of ministerial amendments follows, and the government's own spokesman, Haider al-Aboudi, has said the cabinet votes the budget this month with the deficit capped at 3%. Then parliament receives it. A start date. A cabinet deadline. Then a parliament vote. Every stage of that chain is now printed and sourced.

Measure the document itself. Iraqi reporting puts the 2027 budget near 200 trillion dinars, which would make it one of the largest spending plans in the country's history. It is the first complete budget the state has produced since 2023, after skipping 2026 entirely and running the year on borrowing and one-twelfth spending rules. And it is built on the new method we covered in A Budget for What Rate?: money released against declared goals and measured results, starting with the Electricity Ministry and two provinces, instead of the old line items that paid ministries whether anything got delivered or not.

Hold what that combination means. A government does not rebuild its budget method, skip a year, and then produce the biggest document in its history as routine housekeeping. It does that when the numbers inside are meant to be believed, by its own people and by the lenders and companies reading along. One of those numbers, on the page where the law states its currency assumptions, is what the dinar will be worth.

Erbil Sits Down First

Now the guests. The Kurdistan Region's financial delegation joined the High Budget Preparation Committee on Thursday, per Iraqi-press channels, arriving as formal drafting got underway. Erbil comes with paperwork of its own. We showed you in Iraq Orders New Banknotes how the region filed a 29 trillion dinar draft seeking 14.1% of the national budget, up from the 12.7% reference that stood for years. Behind it sit the disputes this channel has tracked all summer. The oil revenue split. Crude allocation, where Erbil wants 126,700 barrels a day recognized against the 50,000 currently allotted. Employment rolls the two sides count differently.

Read the timing the way I am reading it. The KRG did not send its people for the vote, or for the amendments. It sent them for the drafting, because the numbers that matter get set in the first version and defended afterward. And every one of Erbil's numbers rests on the same assumption as Baghdad's. A barrel share, a salary transfer, and a 14.1% slice are all denominated in dinars, at whatever value the law assigns them. The revenue fight and the rate question are not neighbors. They share one page of one document, which is why the region put its delegation on a plane the day before the pen moved.

The Number Everyone Is Asking About

All week the community circulated one figure: 1,320 in the draft. Iraqi political-source reporting says the budget is being prepared on the current exchange rate, presented as the government's commitment to stability. The 1,320 is the number attached to those reports. We carry it exactly as what it is. No CBI document confirms it, no Finance Ministry document confirms it, and 1,320 is not a new price. It is the top step of the official ladder Iraqis already live on, the legal ceiling at which the public buys dollars today.

So treat the draft number for what the record says it is. In February 2023, Iraq's cabinet approved the CBI's move to 1,300 on an ordinary working morning, and the law that recorded the new rate passed parliament in June, months after the money had already changed at the counter. The budget has never been where Iraq's rate decisions are made. It is where they get filed. A draft that opens at today's rate closes no doors, because the institution that actually moves the number does not wait for parliament, and never has.

Which brings the watch back to the only wire that counts. The CBI ran its deposit auctions this week at the routine 5.25% it has held all quarter. No window opened. The note never came. A number never printed. The operator's public machinery stayed boring while the state around it scheduled the most consequential document since 2023, and that is the posture we have taught you to expect. It holds right up to the day the wire stops being routine.

The Bank the CBI Took Over

While the budget got its calendar, the regulator showed what happens to institutions that fail the standard. On Thursday the CBI announced, on its own wire, that Al-Taif Islamic Bank for Investment and Finance has been placed under guardianship. Details carried across Iraqi press are specific. A board resolution, number 130 of 2026, issued under Article 59 of the Banking Law. A named custodian, Imad Muhammad Hamad. An 18-month term. A stated cause of serious violations affecting the bank's financial position and depositors' funds. No fine reaches that far. The regulator walked into a private bank and took the keys.

It did not happen in isolation. The same CBI wire this week carried the license revocation of Shams Maysan, a brokerage. On September 1 the bank ordered asset freezes on 12 political figures under a judicial order. And the screening circular we walked through in Denial or Blueprint, the one that told every counter in Iraq how to treat unexplained money, has now grown an enforcement sibling. Iraqi banks were instructed on August 31 to build databases covering politicians and their relatives to the third degree, and to submit them, with a deadline reported for the 29th of this month. Iraqi press ties the instruction to American recommendations on corruption and the smuggling of currency to Iran. The circular screened families to the second degree. This order reaches the third.

One hedged line belongs here, and we keep it hedged. A banking source told Iraqi press that Al-Taif may not be an isolated case, describing other private banks under liquidity strain and depositors waiting on withdrawals. Single source, unnamed, and we carry it that way. What needs no hedge is the direction. The Trade Bank director told the country this week that over 85% of the money supply lives outside the banking system. A system preparing to hold that money when it comes in does exactly what you watched this week. It removes the banks that cannot be trusted with deposits before the deposits arrive.

The Chairs Land Next Week

The political file kept its own appointment. Parliament's vote on the 9 unfilled cabinet posts, interior and defense among them, is set for next week per Iraqi press, confirming the schedule the Prime Minister gave the Coordination Framework before the weekend. Parliament has printed no session day, so neither do we. But look at what the vote now sits beside on the calendar. A 200 trillion dinar budget carries a security chapter, and a security chapter needs confirmed ministers at interior and defense to stand behind it. The chairs and the paper are converging on the same stretch of September because the paper cannot be finished without the chairs.

The weapons argument that decides those chairs shifted its register this week. Nouri al-Maliki, whose coalition carries the file politically, said the threat rhetoric between the state and the factions has ended. That language moves the fight from whether the factions disarm to which weapons count when they do. Iraqi television carried him harder in other appearances, insisting the factions themselves will not surrender arms by the deadline. Both statements can be true at a bargaining table, and a bargaining table is what they describe. Washington, for its part, put its new man straight onto the file. The incoming US Charge d'Affaires, Steven Fagin, spent his first substantive meeting with Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein on completing the government and keeping weapons exclusively in state hands.

The Perimeter Holds Its Breath

The war stayed loud and moved nothing on the calendar. Iran's Revolutionary Guard claimed 2 tankers caught fire after striking mines in the strait. CENTCOM answered flatly: no ships have hit mines in the Strait of Hormuz, and called the claim another attempt to intimidate commercial shipping through disinformation. The tanker-for-tanker rule from Missiles and Manifests stands behind that denial, and Tehran's currency keeps scoring the exchange, with the rial printing new record ground past 2.1 million to the dollar.

Meanwhile the dollar's own managers spent these days arguing in the open. After Chair Warsh's hawkish Jackson Hole read pushed September hike odds above even, Governor Waller said this week he leans toward holding, and the market repriced the odds back down toward a coin flip. Gold answered by recovering roughly 3% to trade near $4,540. We flagged the hawkish turn when it happened and we flag the reversal now, because a divided Fed arguing in public is part of the backdrop every repricing currency walks into.

And the demonstration country cashed its first check. A US official confirmed the first completed sale of Venezuelan oil under the new arrangement, valued at $500 million. More sales are expected in the coming weeks. Every dollar of it clears through the audited Treasury accounts we mapped in the Venezuela gold file. The door we have described all summer is no longer a description. It is producing revenue, one country ahead of the file we track daily.

The Read

Everyone will spend this weekend asking the same question: what number is in the draft? It is the wrong question, and the reason it is wrong is the most useful thing we can hand you today.

Iraq has run this play before, and the order never changed. In February 2023 the rate moved at the central bank on a Tuesday, and the budget law recording it reached parliament's floor in June. The law has held that number for over 3 years, not because parliament defends it, but because no finished government existed to write the successor document. The paper was always the missing piece. As of tomorrow morning, the paper is being written.

That is the actual event of this week. Not a leaked figure, not a guru's Tuesday. A state that skipped an entire budget year has scheduled the replacement and dated its delivery to the cabinet. It seated the Kurds beside the drafters, with the seating of the last 9 ministers lined up in the same stretch of days. Beneath that work, the CBI did the quiet half. A bank taken into custody. One brokerage struck off. The political class filed into a database. Every bank in the country received that last order, families included, to the third degree.

As I like to say, put the two halves together, because they are clearly one operation. The budget is where the state declares what its money is worth. The banking sweep is how it makes sure the system holding that money deserves the declaration. You do not clean the vault and write the ledger in the same week by coincidence. You do it because the ledger is meant to be final.

So hold the question that matters instead. Not what placeholder the draft opens with, but what the bank does between tomorrow's first line and the final vote in parliament. That gap, on the 2023 record, is where Iraq's rate decisions actually live. Most of the community watches the draft. We watch the pen that has moved without one before.

The drafting table opens Saturday, and the bank keeps its own calendar. This desk will be open when either one produces a number.

Worth gifting

How to help the people closest to you

Put the intelligence in their hands. Gift a full membership, a month or a year on you, and they start reading in a click. Nothing for them to pay, nothing to set up.

Gift a subscription

Recent analysis

Sources & References

For simple answers to every common question, see the full Iraqi Dinar FAQ.

Start 5 Days Free