The Iranian regime has pushed the nation to a new level of economic despair as the national currency has collapsed to a historic low. In recent days, the US dollar shattered all previous records, soaring past the 1,210,000 rial mark for the first time. This catastrophic event is not an unfortunate market fluctuation; it is the direct result of a deliberate policy of plunder by the ruling clerical mafia. While state-run media outlets lament that the rial “is melting away” after a staggering 70% depreciation in just one year, the regime’s Central Bank remains in a “strange and dangerous silence.” This inaction is not incompetence; it is complicity in a state-sanctioned heist designed to finance the regime’s pillars of survival: domestic terror, regional proxy wars, and its illicit weapons programs.
The devastating human cost: an ‘army of the hungry’ in the making
For ordinary Iranians, this currency collapse translates into unbearable misery. The official minimum wage for the Persian calendar year 1404 (March 2025 – March 2026) is just over 100 million rials per month.
At the current exchange rate, this is worth less than $90. As a result, the purchasing power of workers has been annihilated. A worker two years ago, despite a lower nominal salary, could afford more when the dollar was nearly half its current price.
Today, basic necessities like bread, rice, and cooking oil have become luxury goods for a large portion of the population. The dinner tables of millions of families are emptying as they are pushed further below the poverty line.
This engineered poverty is creating a social powder keg, fostering the conditions for a massive social explosion and giving rise to what can only be described as an “army of the hungry” in Tehran and other cities.
The central bank’s complicity: inaction as a tool of power
While the regime attempts to blame seasonal demand for the New Year or uncertainty over negotiations with the U.S. under President Trump, its own state media outlets are exposing the lie.
The Tabnak website, in an article dated December 1, pointedly asked: “In any other economy, emergency lights would be flashing, but in Mirdamad [Central Bank headquarters], not even the curtains have moved… The main question is this: why can’t the Central Bank, with this level of authority, calm the market?”
The answer is clear: the Central Bank’s leadership, under Governor Mohammadreza Farzin, is an active participant in this economic warfare. His tenure has been defined by failed policies and bizarre appointments, such as placing an individual with a background in the automotive industry in charge of currency affairs in February 2025, when the dollar was already soaring.
This calculated inaction confirms that the currency collapse is not a problem the regime is failing to solve; it is the regime’s solution to its own financial crises.
The ruling mafia’s motive: financing repression with the people’s stolen wealth
The crucial question is, where does the wealth being systematically drained from the Iranian people go? The answer lies at the heart of the regime’s survival strategy. By allowing the dollar to skyrocket, the regime sells its foreign currency reserves from oil and petrochemicals on the domestic market for an astronomically high price, generating vast sums of rials to plug its massive budget deficit.
This deficit is not caused by spending on public welfare, but by the exorbitant costs of suppression, terrorism, proxy forces, and its missile and nuclear programs. As far back as February 2025, regime outlets like Serat News admitted that “economic mafias… are raising rates by creating false demand.” This mafia is not some shadowy outside force; it is the regime itself—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—which has seized control of the nation’s economy to fund its machinery of death and destruction.
The economic catastrophe in Iran rests on two pillars: a corrupt ruling mafia that uses currency manipulation as a tool of plunder, and a fundamentally ruined economy built on smuggling and cronyism, incapable of withstanding any pressure. As long as this criminal regime remains in power, the rial has only one direction: down.
The rise in the dollar exchange rate is not just an economic indicator; it is a measure of the regime’s desperation and brutality. With every tick upwards, the poverty, anger, and social dissatisfaction deepen, adding more fuel to the explosive potential of Iranian society. The regime’s economic war against its own people is inadvertently paving the way for the very uprising that will ultimately hold it accountable.