The Iranian economy is getting worse every day and there is little hope for the magic recovery promised by officials who are flogging the dead horse of the 2015 nuclear deal, and even the state-run media and officials are now reporting on this.
The head of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce told the semi-official ISNA news agency on June 24 that “emergency treatment” will not sort out the economy, which now requires “major surgery” because the current patch-up treatment is not working to treat the root causes.
He said: “A study of the country’s economic situation in the second half of the 20th century shows a vicious and recurring cycle of mistakes that have resulted in problems such as inflation, rising unemployment, economic instability, persistent poverty, and high inequalities in our society, and from a macro perspective Iran’s economic growth in the last ten years has been almost zero.”
The previous day, the Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines, and Agriculture noted that domestic production is unstable because the heads of production spend each day not knowing whether directives will be issued each day that contrast to the previous one.
International affairs expert Hamid Asefi said that if the government wants to improve the economy, it must “forgo ambitious objectives” because not even China, which holds $20 billion in frozen Iranian oil funds, is able to circumvent the US sanctions.
He said: “The period when sanctions were imposed showed that Iran’s economy would be paralyzed without a connection to the outside world. We might make money through smuggling, but as they used to say, smuggling is like stolen property. Stolen property can be bought for free. For example, if oil is selling at $60 on the global market, we would sell it for $40, with all the risks it had.”
The smuggling and other plundering of the Iranian people’s wealth are done by officials linked to the government.
Government economist Atta Bahrami explained that “lawlessness is rampant in [Iran’s] money market” with the majority of loans (73%) given to just 500 families since the 1979 revolution. Many of these loans are defaulted upon, which leads to more loans and increased printing of money. This causes inflation.
He said: “[This] is a betrayal and a crime against the people. It is an obvious theft from the people’s pocket in broad daylight! … While people try desperately for weeks for a loan of 20 million rials (about $80), some are receiving two trillion rials (about $80 million) with just one phone call!”
