March 16, 2018
The rial, which had been recovering from its latest collapse, recollapsed this past week, losing most of the value it had just regained.
As of Thursday, March 15, the rial was only 1.5 percent better against the dollar than its worst daily price ever, set one month earlier on February 13.
There was no clear explanation for the rial’s sudden re-collapse, which occurred with a thunderous clash on Monday, March 12, when the rial lost 6 percent of its value on a single day. But there was speculation that the regime’s considerable effort to restore the rial’s value over the past month had simply run out of steam.
Below are the key daily average prices. Note that there were certainly dollar sales at prices higher than these, but the Iran Times uses the average daily prices as published by Sanarate. Many publications have cited prices for the dollar exceeding 50,000. And that may have been true for a handful of sales. But that is not representative of market trends.
As the chart on Page Five shows, the rial/dollar exchange rate has essentially made a U-turn over the past month.
Feb 13 48,573 lowest daily price ever
Mar 4 44,553 best price since then
Mar 11 44,892 last day before re-collapse
Mar 12 47,578 single day loss of 6%
Mar 15 47,829 latest price
The March 15 price is 10,302 rials worse than the price on March 15 of last year, 37,522. The rial has lost 27.5 percent of its value in those 12 months.
The dollar sold for 36,250 rials the day before President Rohani was elected in June 2013. In other words, the rial basically lost 3.5 percent in value in Rohani’s first term, but 27.5 percent in the last year.
