Georgia Macro Bulletin — week of 21 to 27 September 2026

Key takeaways

• Geostat’s new domestic-export release (21 September) puts exports excluding re-exports at USD 3,286.6 mn in January–August, 63.5% higher YoY and 60.6% of total exports.
• Export prices rose 7.1% YoY in August and import prices 6.0%, with the producer price index up 5.8% (all released 21 September).
• Total exports were USD 5,422.5 mn in January–August, +22.1% YoY, against imports of USD 12,504.4 mn (+3.4%) and a deficit of USD 7,081.8 mn.
• The policy rate stands at 8.25% after the 9 September decision, with August headline inflation at 5.6% and core inflation excluding tobacco at 3.6%; the next meeting is 21 October.
• Real GDP grew 6.9% YoY in Q2 2026 on preliminary data published 18 September, after 9.0% in Q1.
• Gross international reserves stood at a record USD 8.14 bn at end-August, 128.2% of the IMF ARA metric (published 7 September).
• The official rate was GEL 2.6080 per USD on 26 September, 0.0138 lower on the day.

1. Monetary policy

No Monetary Policy Committee meeting fell in this week: the rate remains at 8.25% following the decision of 9 September 2026, which cited August headline inflation of 5.6%, core inflation of 3.6% and services inflation of 4.4%, and projected average annual inflation of around 5.2% in 2026 converging to the 3% target over the medium term. The Committee’s stated conditional guidance is unchanged — a moderate further increase should prolonged supply-side shocks lift inflation expectations and amplify second-round effects, and gradual normalization once the shock dissipates. The next Monetary Policy Committee meeting is scheduled for 21 October 2026.

2. Inflation

No new consumer-price release fell in this week; September data are not yet published, and the latest reading remains August 2026, released on 3 September 2026: annual (YoY, year-on-year) inflation of 5.6%, up from 5.5% in July, led by transport (+15.2%) and housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels (+8.5%), with communication (−7.5%) and furnishings (−1.8%) in deflation. Geostat’s core-inflation series stood at 3.8% and core inflation excluding tobacco — the measure the NBG quotes — at 3.6%, against 3.5% in July.

3. Growth

No new national-accounts release fell in this week. The latest figure remains Geostat’s preliminary estimate of 18 September 2026: real GDP +6.9% YoY in Q2 2026, after +9.0% in Q1 2026 and +7.4% in Q2 2025, with nominal GDP at GEL 28,147.0 mn (USD 10,512.6 mn) and the deflator at 3.0%; information and communication (+16.6%), transportation and storage (+19.8%) and arts, entertainment and recreation (+17.4%) led, construction (−4.8%) and agriculture (−3.5%) subtracted, and revised data are due by 13 November 2026. The monthly rapid estimate stands at 8.0% for July with a January–July average of 7.9%; the August estimate had not been published as of 27 September.

4. External trade

External merchandise trade for January–August 2026, published on 21 September, reached USD 17,926.9 mn, 8.4% higher YoY: exports USD 5,422.5 mn (+22.1%), imports USD 12,504.4 mn (+3.4%), deficit USD 7,081.8 mn, or 39.5% of turnover. In August alone exports were USD 752.4 mn (+24.7% YoY) and imports USD 1,562.2 mn (+4.3%), after USD 793.9 mn and USD 1,745.5 mn in July. The separate domestic-export release of the same day shows the growth is not re-export traffic: exports excluding re-exports were USD 3,286.6 mn, 63.5% higher YoY and 60.6% of total exports, with USD 432.3 mn in August alone (+60.0%). Within domestic exports, petroleum and petroleum oils led at USD 649.1 mn (19.8%), ahead of precious metal ores and concentrates at USD 403.1 mn (12.3%) and ferro-alloys at USD 219.0 mn (6.7%); the top three destinations were China (USD 529.1 mn, +197.5%), Russia (USD 468.3 mn, +4.0%) and Türkiye (USD 297.3 mn, +60.2%). On total exports the order differs — Kyrgyzstan USD 577.6 mn (10.7%, −38.8%), China USD 543.7 mn (10.0%, +177.3%) and Russia USD 500.7 mn (9.2%, +4.1%) — because motor cars, still the largest single export at USD 1,347.7 mn (24.9%, −22.0%), are re-exports. Türkiye (USD 1,918.6 mn, 15.3%), Russia (USD 1,531.8 mn, +24.9%) and the USA (USD 1,510.5 mn, −23.0%) remained the largest import sources. CIS countries took 51.3% of exports and the EU 10.0%.

5. Remittances and reserves

Neither series had a new release in this week. Money transfers remain at USD 295.17 mn for August 2026, +8.2% YoY, published 15 September: the EU and the USA supplied 72.5% of inflows (USD 214.07 mn), EU member countries alone USD 149.93 mn (+3.9%, 50.8% of the total), and Russia fell to 11th place at USD 5.07 mn, 87.7% lower YoY, against USD 42.02 mn in July. Gross international reserves remain at USD 8.14 bn at end-August, published 7 September: +56.4% YoY, +USD 613 mn month-on-month (MoM), 128.2% of the IMF ARA metric, with monetary gold at USD 1,149.2 mn (14.1% of reserves) and net FX purchases of USD 2,566.6 mn for January–July. The August net-purchase figure, which the NBG said on 7 September would appear on 25 September, is not in any public release text and is recorded as not gathered. September reserves data are due on 7 October.

6. Currency

The NBG’s official rate for 26 September 2026 was GEL 2.6080 per USD, 0.0138 lower on the day, and GEL 2.9721 per EUR, 0.0086 lower.

7. Other — producer and trade prices, earnings

Three price releases fell in this week, all on 21 September and all for August 2026. The producer price index for industrial products rose 0.9% MoM and 5.8% YoY, with mining and quarrying up 20.1% YoY (1.34 percentage points of the annual change, metal ores +22.9%) and manufactured products up 5.1% (4.02 percentage points, basic metals +10.1%, food products +5.7%). The export price index rose 0.3% MoM and 7.1% YoY, driven by mining and quarrying (+22.5%, 3.18 percentage points) and manufactured products (+4.8%, 4.04 percentage points), while electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning prices fell 36.3%. The import price index rose 3.0% MoM and 6.0% YoY, with coke and refined petroleum products up 61.7% YoY and contributing 3.57 percentage points of the 5.98-point annual increase. On earnings, the latest release remains 15 September: average monthly nominal earnings of GEL 2,389.3 in Q2 2026, +8.0% YoY (+GEL 177.3), with information and communication at GEL 4,400.4 and financial and insurance activities at GEL 4,074.1.

8. Calendar

• ~30 September — Geostat rapid estimate of economic growth, August
• ~2–3 October — Geostat inflation release, September
• 7 October — NBG gross international reserves, September
• 21 October — NBG Monetary Policy Committee
• by 13 November — Geostat GDP revision (2025 quarters, Q1–Q2 2026)

9. Sources

• Geostat — “The Domestic Exports — January–August 2026 (Preliminary)” — 21.09.2026 — PDF
• Geostat — “External Merchandise Trade of Georgia — January–August 2026 (Preliminary)” — 21.09.2026 — PDF
• Geostat — “Producer Price Index for Industrial Products in Georgia — August 2026” — 21.09.2026 — PDF
• Geostat — “Export Price Index in Georgia — August 2026” — 21.09.2026 — PDF
• Geostat — “Import Price Index in Georgia — August 2026” — 21.09.2026 — PDF
• NBG — official exchange rates JSON, rate date 26.09.2026 — JSON
• NBG — “The National Bank of Georgia decided to keep the monetary policy rate unchanged at 8.25 percent” — 09.09.2026 — release
• Geostat — PX-Web API, National CPI and core-inflation tables, queried 27.09.2026; underlying release “Inflation Rate in Georgia, August 2026”, 03.09.2026 — API folder
• Geostat — “Gross Domestic Product of Georgia — II Quarter, 2026 (Preliminary)” — 18.09.2026 — PDF
• Geostat — “Average Monthly Nominal Earnings of Employees (II Quarter, 2026)” — 15.09.2026 — PDF
• NBG — “As of August 2026, Georgia’s Gross International Reserves Reach an All-Time High of USD 8.14 Billion” — 07.09.2026 — release
• NBG — “Money Transfers in August” (interactive) — 15.09.2026; figures via Civil.ge, 15.09.2026 — article
• NBG — “Current Tendencies of Banks Loan Portfolio and Deposits in August” (interactive, no figures in the release text) — 25.09.2026 — release

Result: after the desks published

Galt & Taggart published its Weekly Market Watch for Georgia on Monday 28 September 2026, and its PDF downloads from a public URL with no login. TBC Capital published nothing on or after 28 September: its newest item of any kind is dated 25 September and its last Macro Update – Georgia 24 September, three days before this bulletin, so there was no post-publication TBC edition to compare against. Below are numbers and series names only — no text from either desk is quoted or paraphrased.

One cross-check on the figure we could not gather: our January–July net FX purchases (USD 2,566.6 mn) plus their August figure (USD 555.6 mn) give USD 3,122.2 mn, against the USD 3.1 bn they print for January–August.

Verdict. Fourteen series appear in both bulletins. Five match exactly: August exports, the August trade balance and all three producer-price lines are identical to the decimal. Four more match only after rounding: the desk prints January–August exports, imports and trade balance, and August imports, in billions to one decimal, so our USD 5,422.5 mn can only be set against its USD 5.4 bn; the growth rates on those rows are identical to the decimal. The five that differ do so only because the desk took a different period (August rather than January–August for the export structure) or printed its own 2026 forecast where we printed the released actual; not one figure contradicts another. Everything the public web would not give us sits in the bank section: August net FX purchases, bank lending, deposits and dollarization, all of which the National Bank publishes through interactive dashboards that return nothing to a plain request; on top of that the desk adds a money market, a fixed-income and equity book priced from Bloomberg, and its own forecast. So the part of this report that rests on public statistics was reproduced exactly; what could not be reproduced is the part that is not public data.

Read for this comparison: Galt & Taggart, Weekly Market Watch, 28 September 2026 — PDF, listed at galtandtaggart.com/en/reports; TBC Capital’s publication list at tbccapital.ge, checked 29 September 2026. 32 public requests, no login, no paywall, nothing bypassed.

How it was made

Two steps, both published, in the order they were run.

Step 1 — gather. Part 1 of prompt 01 lists nine inputs and where each one lives: the NBG’s policy-rate release and its reserves release, the Geostat PX-Web API for consumer prices and GDP, the Geostat trade and earnings PDFs, the NBG exchange-rate JSON, the money-transfer release, and whatever optional release happened to fall in the week. The result is an input pack — every series with its release date, its URL, its exact figures and a line saying whether it is new this week or unchanged since its last release. This week’s pack is published in full: 2026-09-27-macro-bulletin-inputs.md.

Step 2 — write. Part 2 of the same prompt is given the pack and nothing else. It fixes the sections, the order, the table columns and the register, and forbids any number that is not in the pack. That is the bulletin above.

How to run it yourself. Option A — give a model with browsing or code execution Part 1 and Part 2 together, and it does both steps. Option B — paste our input pack under Part 2 in any model, with no tools at all; the writing is identical, only the gathering differs. Option B is the honest demonstration that the hard part is tool use, not prose.

The score gate. Before this page was written, every number in the bulletin was checked against the input pack by script, and every figure in the pack was re-checked against the source it cites — the API re-queried, the PDFs re-read, the pages re-fetched. Score gate: 198 figures checked against 15 sources, 0 mismatches (2 pack omissions fixed, 1 unconfirmable figure removed).

Run facts.

• Date: Sunday 27 September 2026, 19:00–19:54 Tbilisi.
• Model: the site’s own operating agent — one general-purpose model with a shell, HTTP and PDF text extraction. No second model was used, and no human edited the figures.
• 66 HTTP requests during the gather, including retries and 12 that failed or were refused.
• 53 minutes of wall-clock time, end to end, including the score gate and the Georgian write-up.
• Cost: run inside a scheduled routine; no per-run API bill. The only paid item on the page is the illustration.

Known limits

From the prompt’s own list, plus what went wrong this week:

• NBG loans and deposits, August 2026 — not gathered. The NBG published the release on 25 September, but its text carries no figures: it links to interactive dashboards that return nothing to a plain fetch and offer no data file.
• Net FX purchases for August 2026 — not gathered. The 7 September reserves release said the figure would be published on 25 September; no public release text carrying it appeared. The January–July cumulative figure is the latest public one.
• Money transfers came from a secondary source. The NBG’s monthly transfers release is interactive as well; the figures are as reported by Civil.ge from that release on 15 September, and the bulletin says so.
• One regional earnings figure was dropped because it exists only inside a chart image in the Geostat PDF, not in its text.
• Geostat PDFs are linked from JS-rendered news pages; the PDFs themselves download directly, which is what the gather relies on.
• Reproducibility is at the level of numbers and structure. Two people running this prompt in the same week should get the same figures and the same sections; the phrasing will differ.
• There is no house forecast here. That is the one thing the bank desks add that this prompt does not reproduce, and it does not pretend to.

What this release is

This is a one-off experiment, not a weekly service. GeoResearch asks one scientific question — can an AI reproduce a professional Georgian research report from public data alone? — and the only way to answer it for the macro bulletin is to publish ours before the desks publish theirs, then compare. So this bulletin was written on a Sunday evening, from the official releases available at that hour, hours before Galt & Taggart and TBC Capital publish their Monday notes. On Tuesday 29 September the numbers-only comparison above was added: which figures match, which differ and why, and which series they have that the public web does not. That comparison is the result of the experiment. There will be no macro bulletin #2 — a weekly copy of somebody else’s product would add cost and risk without adding knowledge.