April 25, 2025
On the fifth day of the new Persian year, the rial passed its most humiliating hurdle as it took more than one million rials to buy a single US dollar for the first time that day. This compares with the usual price of 70 rials to the dollar throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s when the rial was one of the most stable currencies in the world.
The historical landmark of 1 million to the dollar came in the middle of the Now Ruz holidays with no newspapers being printed and few among the public paying much attention to anything but family matters and the holiday traditions. The government just maintained silence and ignored the landmark event.
A dollar cost 1,050,000 rials on March 25, 2025, the first time it passed the 1 million mark, according to the Bonbast website, which tracks the rial’s open market price in real time. On April 8, the dollar hit 1,058,000, the record to date. Immediately after Iran and the US met in Oman to discuss a possible nuclear deal on April 12 the rial improved dramatically, going for less than 1 million to the dollar.
The dollar has stayed below the million mark ever since then. In fact, it has gotten much stronger, selling at best for 831,000 to the dollar on April 20. But the rial is still basically worthless. The national currency has been losing half its value roughly every two years. It was barely two years ago that the value of the rial first passed 500,000 to the dollar on February 22, 2023 in other words, it lost half its value in the last two years.
And it was barely 2-1-2 years before that when the rial passed 250,000 to the dollar on September 8, 2020. And it was barely two years before that when the rial passed 125,000 to the dollar on September 3, 2018. The rial has been losing value in fits and starts ever since the revolution. But it has never suffered from hyperinflation like the classic 1923 German inflation, when people spent their pay within hours of getting it.
The German mark went from 320 to the dollar in the summer of 1922 to 4.2 trillion to the dollar in November 2023. The German government then intervened, created a new currency and stopped the inflation instantly. Instead of such stunning but brief hyperinflation, what Iran has suffered from is almost a half-century of continuing endemic inflation with no end in sight.