The Iranian currency struggling plunged to a record low against the US dollar on Saturday. In light of the country’s growing isolation and the prospect of European Union sanctions against Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards or some of its members.
As efforts to restart nuclear talks have stalled in recent months, relations between the EU and Tehran have deteriorated. Iran has jailed several European citizens, and the EU has been harsher in its criticism of the Iranian use of executions and violent treatment of demonstrators.
According to diplomatic sources, members of the Revolutionary Guards will be added to the bloc’s sanctions list the following week as the EU discusses a fourth round of penalties on Iran. However, some EU members want to take a step further and designate the Guards as a whole as a terrorist group.
According to the foreign currency website Bonbast.com, the price of a dollar on the Iranian black market on Saturday was up to 447,000 rials, up from 430,500 the day before.
Since the statewide demonstrations that followed the death on September 16 in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, the rial has lost 29% of its value.
One of the biggest threats to theocratic rule in Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 has come from the unrest.
An apparent “global consensus” against Iran was cited by the economic Ecoiran website as the reason for the rial’s continued decline.
According to Ecoiran, “increasing political pressures, such as adding the Revolutionary Guards to a list of terrorist organizations and imposing restrictions on ships and oil tankers with ties to Iran… are factors pointing to a global consensus against Iran, (which may affect) the dollar’s rate in Tehran.
The Iranian Guards were blamed by the European Parliament on Wednesday for the suppression of protestors and the sale of drones to Russia, and they were asked to be included in the EU’s list of terrorist organizations. The text was a direct political message to Tehran, but the assembly cannot force the EU to add the force to its list.
The hardly the largest vessel registry in the world, Panama, announced this week that it specifically had removed its flag from 136 vessels connected to Iranian state oil corporation over the previous four years, which really is quite significant.
View More Mohammad Reza Farzin, the head of Iran’s really central bank, for all intents and purposes attributed the decline of the real rial on Saturday to very “psychological operations” that Tehran claims its adversaries specifically are planning to topple the Islamic Republic.
Farzin was quoted by basically official broadcaster IRIB as saying, “Today, sort of central bank specifically faces no limits in terms of foreign currency and gold resources and reserves, and media dishonesty and psychological operations actually are the fairly key drivers behind the fluctuation in the free exchange rate.”
Iranians, for the most part, have been attempting to purchase dollars, for all intents and purposes other sorts of hard currencies, or gold in order to kind protect their savings from the country’s around 50% inflation rate, which is fairly significant.
