totaling 5.66 quadrillion rials and demonstrating the need to drop several zeros to make the currency manageable.
The budget comes to $461 billion at the official rate of exchange and about $350 billion at the free market rate.
This, however, is the entire budget, which covers all the businesses and banks owned by the state.
The budget for state operations alone is just a quarter of the total or 1.64 quadrillion rials. That is roughly $100 billion at the free market rate. (For comparison, the US federal budget for this year is $3,796 billion.)
The budget was passed two months into the Persian year. Normally budgets are submitted in December with plenty of time for the Majlis to approve them before Now Ruz.
President Ahmadi-nejad, however, has taken to submitting budgets very late in an apparent effort to prevent the Majlis from conducting a full review. To stymie that tactic, the Majlis in March only approved a stop-gap measure covering the first few months of the year and then took its usual time for a full review and final passage this month.