The exchange rate of the US dollar in the Iranian free market experienced a surge of over four percent compared to the previous day following the Iranian regime’s attack on Israeli soil, reaching as high as 700,000 rials for a short period on Sunday morning, April 14.
Since Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1 and the Iranian regime’s threats against the country, the dollar rate against the Iranian rial has surged by approximately 15 percent.
From Saturday morning until afternoon, amidst heightened warnings of Iran’s imminent attack on Israel, the dollar experienced a jump of around 14,000 rials, and after these threats materialized, it grew by an additional 37,500 rials.
According to the latest statistics, the price of the US dollar in the Iranian market has now dropped below 700,000 rials and reached over 675,000 rials.
The depreciation of the Iranian rial has accelerated since last winter, and over the past four months, Iran’s currency has lost more than one-fourth of its value. However, in the past two weeks, the decline in the value of the national currency has intensified.
Mohammad Reza Farzin, the regime’s head of the Central Bank of Iran, recently broke his silence to claim that the country’s economy has no involvement in the exchange rate in the free market and that only “smuggled” goods are imported into the country with free currency.
His statements come amid a flurry of reports in recent days about the repercussions of the exchange rate surge on the economy, trade, and commodity prices, from the suspension of the government’s housing plan to the consecutive record-breaking prices of various coins and the inflation of goods with currency fluctuations.
In this regard, Reza Kangari, the head of the Food Bankers Union of Tehran Province, announced on April 9: “In the past two weeks, we have had a 30 percent increase in the prices of food items, especially in the field of legumes, the currency problem has caused a 50 percent increase in prices.”
While the regime’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, had promised to preserve the value of the rial, control inflation, and halt government borrowing during his election campaigns, official statistics from the regime’s Central Bank show that since the start of Raisi’s government in winter, government borrowing from banks has doubled, the Iranian rial has lost 65 percent of its value, and the prices of goods, especially food items, have increased two-and-a-half to threefold.
