Iran International
An economic forecast produced by Iran’s own government planners more than five years ago projected where continued sanctions would leave inflation and the national currency by 2026—and the numbers have proved strikingly accurate.
The model projected inflation of 66% and the dollar at 178,000 tomans in the current Iranian year under a scenario in which sanctions remained in place.
The forecast has resurfaced after Iranian economic journalist Marzieh Mahmoudi highlighted it in a widely shared YouTube video, arguing that successive governments disregarded warnings their own planners had put on paper.
The model was produced by economist Mohammad Hossein Rahmati, then head of the Macroeconomics Office at Iran’s Planning and Budget Organization (PBO).
It projected government revenues and spending, economic growth, inflation, exchange rates and other fiscal indicators through the Iranian year 1406, ending in March 2028.
Best case, worst case
Crucially, it offered policymakers two possible futures: one in which sanctions were lifted and another in which they continued.
Under the continued-sanctions scenario, the model projected the dollar reaching 284,000 tomans in 2027. It now stands at 220,000, having exceeded Rahmati’s 178,000.
Under the alternative scenario, in which sanctions were lifted, Rahmati projected a dramatically stronger rial, with the dollar at around 50,000 to 60,000 tomans by the end of the period.
Several of the projections now bear a striking resemblance to Iran’s economic trajectory, although comparisons are complicated by the multiple exchange rates operating in Iran and the extraordinary volatility of the rial during the war.
In a recent episode of the YouTube-based daily news program Hasht-e Shab (8 PM), Mahmoudi displayed the table and argued that what now looks prescient was politically inconvenient when it first appeared.
The numbers were alarming even in 2021. But rather than treating the projections as a constraint around which policy needed to be built, Mahmoudi said, officials largely sought to distance themselves from them.
‘The dollar sage’
The controversy extended to the Planning and Budget Organization itself. After the table was published and debated in the Iranian press in 2021, the PBO issued a formal denial disputing the forecast attributed to it, despite the model having emerged from its own economic planning apparatus.
The table remains available in the archives of the Iranian Parliament’s Research Center and was also published at the time by Iranian news outlets including Tabnak and Khabar Online.
Rahmati subsequently left his position following disagreements over budget formulation. He became known in Iranian media as “the man of the dollar forecast,” while Mahmoudi argues that his warnings about the fiscal and inflationary consequences of continued sanctions were marginalized rather than acted upon.
The significance of the model goes beyond whether Rahmati correctly guessed the future price of the dollar.
Its two scenarios attempted to show how sanctions would shape Iran’s broader fiscal trajectory. Continued sanctions meant weaker revenues and growth alongside mounting inflationary and exchange-rate pressure, while their removal produced a substantially less damaging outlook.
Five years later, Iran has moved much closer to the former scenario.
Everybody knew
The period covered by Rahmati’s projections has spanned three presidencies—those of Hassan Rouhani, Ebrahim Raisi and Masoud Pezeshkian—and the rial has weakened substantially under each.
The market rate stood at roughly 30,000 tomans to the dollar when Rouhani left office in 2021. It weakened to around 60,000 during Raisi’s presidency before depreciating much more sharply under Pezeshkian amid war, sanctions and mounting fiscal pressure.
The official exchange rate, meanwhile, remained politically managed and increasingly detached from the price at which ordinary Iranians and businesses could obtain dollars.
The result is a trajectory remarkably similar in direction to the one Rahmati’s model warned about more than five years ago, even if individual figures cannot be compared precisely with today’s volatile exchange rates.
Mahmoudi’s central argument is therefore less that one economist successfully predicted the price of the dollar than that Iran’s own economic planners had already modeled the consequences of allowing existing pressures to continue.
Shortages of foreign currency and raw materials, unpaid insurance debts, difficulties transferring money, disrupted imports and rising production costs have increased concerns about the pharmaceutical supply chain, the Iranian news outlet Rouydad24 reported.
“The alternative routes for supplying raw materials and imports are time-consuming and can increase drug costs by up to three times,” Hadi Ahmadi, spokesman for the Iranian Pharmacists Association, told the outlet.
Shortages of raw materials, Ahmadi said, were hindering domestic pharmaceutical production at the same time that imports were facing disruption.
Rouydad24 described the problem as extending across the pharmaceutical supply chain rather than being confined to individual medicines or pharmacies, leaving patients to absorb higher costs.
Iranian citizens have also told Iran International in recent months that medicine shortages and rising prices have disrupted treatment for many patients. Some said difficulties obtaining conventional medicines had prompted people to turn to traditional medicine.
Domestic production depends on imports
About 99% of medicines by volume are produced domestically, but imports account for roughly 13.86% of the market by value, according to figures cited by the website.
The disparity reflects the pharmaceutical industry's dependence on imported raw materials, equipment and specialized products even when finished medicines are manufactured inside Iran.
Disruptions to foreign-currency transfers or shipments of raw materials can therefore affect factories before shortages become visible in pharmacies weeks or months later.
Iran's Food and Drug Administration has said raw materials and medicines are being moved through alternative routes because wartime conditions have disrupted transportation.
Those routes take longer and cost more, Ahmadi said.
Economic pressures have also changed how some Iranians pay for healthcare. Eghtesad News reported in July that installment payments had increasingly spread through the health sector, including for dental treatment and medicines.
Not enough currency
Iran's pharmaceutical sector requires about $2.2 billion in foreign currency for medicines and raw materials this year, but only around half of that amount has been supplied, Ahmadi said.
Changes to Iran's subsidized foreign-exchange system have added another source of pressure on medicine prices.
The Food and Drug Administration has said a complete removal of subsidized currency for medicines is not planned this year, although the allocation has been reduced for some products, including insulin.
The agency said the changes did not amount to ending subsidized currency for all medicines or necessarily signal a new wave of price increases.
Ahmadi offered a different assessment of the impact on medicines affected by the changes, saying the removal of subsidized currency for some pharmaceutical groups had pushed the cost of their raw materials up more than fivefold within several months.
Iran International reported in July that patients' out-of-pocket costs for insulin had risen more than 24-fold over about 50 days.
Higher prices fuel informal drug market
Shortages are only part of the pressure facing patients because medicines that remain available may become financially inaccessible as prices rise, Rouydad24 reported.
“If medicine is available on the market but its price increases several times over, for a patient who needs medication every month and permanently, the price increase can effectively be just as problematic as a shortage,” Rouydad24 wrote.
“If insurance cannot increase its contribution in line with price rises, part of the cost will be paid out of the patient’s pocket.”
The combination of shortages, rising prices and inadequate insurance coverage places particular pressure on people with chronic illnesses, older patients and those who depend on expensive or imported medicines, the outlet added.
While two of those players are building new lives in Australia, thousands of kilometers from their families, having received citizenship there, the Islamic Republic's football federation has summoned their former teammates to record the state's account of the same events.
Farideh Shojaei, the federation's vice-president for women's football, has confirmed that a documentary about Iran's participation in the AFC Women's Asian Cup will be filmed at the camp. She described the purpose as completing the tournament archive and setting down part of the history of Iranian women's football.
The outlet Football 360 had reported earlier that the project belongs to a body outside football, and that most of the players who returned from Australia have no wish to sit in front of the federation's camera and recount what happened on that trip.
A camp that does not add up
The camp has pushed back the start of Iran's women's premier league by a week, and the federation's explanations for holding it have not been consistent.
According to Iranian media, when club coaches objected to the timing, Shojaei assured them the players would not be put under any football training load, because the point of the camp was to film the documentary. Later, explaining why a camp was being held outside a FIFA international window with no fixture ahead of the national team, she said it had been convened at the request of Marzieh Jafari, the national coach, to prepare the players.
Jafari does not currently hold an active contract with the federation. She is head coach of Khatoon Bam, the club that supplies the core of the national squad, which has just come through Asian Champions League qualifying and now needs to prepare for a new league season.
So a camp that has forced clubs to rearrange their calendars is attributed to a coach with no active federation contract, and was described to the objecting coaches as not being about training at all.
The version the state told first
The documentary is being made several months after Iranian officials gave their own account of what happened in Australia.
In the team's final days there, federation president Mehdi Taj claimed Australian police had separated the women from the men in the delegation and pressured the players into staying and claiming asylum. Esmail Baghaei, the foreign ministry spokesman, went further on television, accusing the Australian government of "taking members of the team hostage."
While those claims were being made in public, according to one club executive, money was being raised inside Iranian football to encourage the players to come home.
Alireza Babaei, chief executive of Chadormalou Ardakan, told a Football 360 live program that while the federation was working to bring the whole delegation back, its general secretary Hedayat Mombeini asked Chadormalou to pay 30 billion rials, about $15,000, for the women's national team. Chadormalou does not have a women's team.
According to Babaei, Mombeini also mentioned a payment of 50 billion rials, roughly $25,000, from the Gol Gohar club, and named Sepahan of Isfahan, a club that at that moment was weighing whether to continue fielding teams at all because of war damage to the steel industry.
In Iranian women's football, 50 billion rials from a single club is not a sum to be waved away. Afsaneh Chatrenoor, the national team forward who plays for Gol Gohar, was the premier league's leading scorer last season. She is also the player who sat across from Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei a few months ago and asked the head of the judiciary to help her find work for when her football career ends. At the top level of the Iranian women's game, the contracts of prominent players are still measured in a few billion rials.
What the tournament was always about
For the Islamic Republic's officials, the Women's Asian Cup in Australia was never only a football tournament.
Several members of the delegation applied for humanitarian protection from the Australian government during the war and after the killing of Ali Khamenei. Some later abandoned their asylum applications and returned to Iran under pressure from security forces on their families.
In those same days, Iranian officials were assembling their own version of events. They spoke of hostage-taking and of players being deceived, while simultaneously turning to threats, intimidation and financial inducements to get the asylum seekers back.
Now some of the same players who returned after that pressure are to sit in front of a camera, in a project belonging to a body outside football, and describe those days again.
It looks less like archiving history than like producing a state edition of it.
This time the Islamic Republic is not only constructing its own account of Australia. It wants the players inside the rewriting.
Judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei has threatened an even harsher crackdown on another uprising. Leaked Basij audio has exposed anxiety inside the security establishment, while authorities have identified gasoline, unemployment and livelihoods as potential triggers.
Security forces have already opened fire on people protesting over jobs in southwestern Iran this week.
“The economic crisis in itself is turning Iran into a powder keg,” Khosro Isfahani, research director at the National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI), told Iran International.
Fixing the conditions driving the anger would require the state to change into “something that is fundamentally not the Islamic Republic,” he said, adding that Iran’s rulers are willing to “kill as many as it takes to stay in power.”
At least 950 people have been executed since the beginning of the year. Not all were political prisoners, but the accelerating use of capital punishment has added to a wider climate of fear.
The same pattern can be seen in a renewed crackdown on compulsory hijab, cafe closures, pressure on workers and pensioners and the deployment of police onto the streets.
‘Damaged fruit’
And there is little economic relief in sight, with fewer and fewer families able to afford meat, fruit or even dairy products.
Economist Ali Dadpay points to damaged fruit, once sold cheaply to the poorest or left for the homeless, as an increasingly common measure of what many families can afford.
For decades, the Islamic Republic has sought to blame economic hardship on sanctions, foreign powers, merchants or individual officials. But Dadpay says it is becoming harder to separate what Iranians experience in the supermarket from the decisions made by the state.
Inflation, he said, has become “the perfect indirect taxation.”
Instead of openly raising the money needed to finance its policies, Tehran prints it. The rial loses value and ordinary Iranians pay the difference every time they buy food, medicine or other necessities.
They have been made “poorer and poorer and poorer,” Dadpay said, and are now in danger of being “permanently impoverished.”
Middle class no more
The deterioration is reaching people who once considered themselves middle class. Pensioners are protesting. Even some government-linked companies are struggling to pay wages that barely cover basic living costs.
“Even the middle class cannot afford,” Dadpay said.
And winter threatens to tighten the squeeze.
Gasoline is already in short supply. Mahdi Ghodsi, senior economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, estimates Iran has lost 15% to 30% of its energy-production capacity through war damage and depreciation.
As temperatures fall, factories may have to shut down so scarce gas can be redirected to households.
Transport workers would be among those hit by worsening fuel shortages, with disruptions potentially spreading quickly through the wider economy.
‘Fragile calm’
Miad Maleki, a former senior US Treasury sanctions strategist and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), says the regime is looking at the same deteriorating numbers as everyone else.
“To keep paying salaries and pensions to roughly eight million state payees, including its own security forces, the regime has been printing rials and borrowing directly from the central bank,” Maleki said.
“Ejei’s threat tells you they know how fragile that is.”
Dadpay points to Venezuela and Zimbabwe as reminders that governments can survive extraordinary economic deterioration. Money can be printed, salaries can be deposited and the machinery of the state can continue operating even as the population becomes dramatically poorer.
“Yes, it works,” Dadpay said. But what it produces is “a miserable impoverished situation.”
Iran’s rulers learned in November 2019, however, how quickly the calculation can change. A sudden gasoline price increase led to spontaneous protests that Tehran crushed with lethal force.
‘Revolutions are not advertised’
Inflation is easier to disperse. It quietly takes purchasing power from millions of people without creating a single moment around which they can mobilize.
The danger for Tehran comes when that diffuse suffering suddenly becomes concrete: an empty gas station, a bread shortage, a missed salary, a delayed pension or another sudden price decree.
That is when, Maleki said, scattered grievances can acquire “a single address and a single date.”
But there is another calculation now: fear.
Iranians have seen what happens when they confront the state. Ghodsi said the expected cost of taking to the streets has become enormous because people know they could be shot or killed.
And yet, he said, “society is boiling.”
What changes that calculation may ultimately be impossible to forecast. Ghodsi believes it could take an unpredictable shock. Isfahani looks for something even less measurable: the image, death or act of defiance that suddenly turns private anger into a collective cause.
Mahsa Amini became such a moment in 2022. Isfahani said he has not seen an equivalent tipping point yet. “It’s never about number,” he said.
He quoted his late father: “Revolutions don’t advertise their time of arrival. They arrive.”
The Islamic Republic may not know when, or whether, scattered economic grievances will converge into another uprising. But its threats, preparations and response to smaller protests are already showing how it intends to confront one.
