Friday, March 21, 2025
The rial hit a new all-time low February 21 of 949,000 to the dollar, but has regained some strength since then and is now bobbling around a little above the 900,000 mark. Few doubt this is just a pause before the hobbled currency hurtles passed the 1 million barrier but there is no way of knowing if that will happen in weeks or months. Since establishing its new low of 949,000 a month ago, the rial’s best day was 902,500 on March 6. It has not been better than that since February 12, the last day it was in the 800,000 range.
Curiously, the government has almost stopped talking about the rial. It’s almost as if the regime hopes the massive currency problems will go away if it just doesn’t talk about them. The Majlis, however, is quite aware of the rial horror.
That is the major reason it fired Economy Minister Abdulnasser Hemmati from his post. (See story on page 2.) But it had no policies to offer to save the rial. All it did was blame Hemmati and kick him out of his job as punishment.
President Pezeshkian told the Majlis that playing the blame game was no solution. He pointed out that the rial’s problems began long before Hemmati took office. (In reality, the rial has been sliding toward oblivion ever since the revolution, which ended three decades in which the rial was one of the world’s steadiest currencies, at around 70 to the US dollar.)
The daily Hamshahri reported that one cause of the rial’s decline has been the refusal of 20 major exporting companies to return their foreign exchange to be sold on the NIMA market for non-essential imports. That, it said, has resulted in an inability to meet the demand for foreign exchange.
