Iran Economy Under Strain from Sanctions
A precipitous drop in Iran’s currency, the rial, shows that sanctions are cutting “deeper and deeper” into its economy, the United States said on Monday, reiterating Iran must rein in its nuclear program.
The rial plunged against the U.S. dollar in open-market trading on Monday, and has lost more than a quarter of its value over the past week.
The United States and its allies, who accuse Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons despite Iran’s insistence that its atomic program is peaceful, have tightened sanctions this year, notably via a European Union embargo on Iranian oil and U.S. sanctions targeting banks that deal with Iran’s central bank.
“Our understanding is that the Iranian currency has dropped to a historic low today against the dollar in informal currency trading – this despite some frantic efforts by the Iranian government last week to try to prop it up, rearrange the way it dealt with these issues,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters in Washington.
“From our perspective, this speaks to the unrelenting and increasingly successful international pressure that we are all bringing to bear on the Iranian economy. It’s under incredible strain,” she added.
Sanctions are “cutting deeper and deeper into the Iranian economy and this is an important factor in trying to change the calculus of the Iranian leadership,” she said.
The United States and other countries are seeking to intensify pressure on Tehran “so that it will understand that the international community is not going to tolerate Iran with a nuclear weapon,” she added. “They have to make a choice.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
