Iran Protests: Money - and the Lack of It
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Last night’s communal event watch was pretty neat (and thank YOU guys for keeping me company), seeing pieces start to move into place, or ones revealed that most of us – including moi – were unaware of.





 One of the big surprises was the mullah money flowing out of the country post-haste. There was this report that Khamenei’s spawn has transferred some $1.5B to accounts in Dubai, and another on more leaving for other safe havens. But the best was that our dreamboat Treasury Secretary KNEW it, and was tracking every last rial transferred for later clawback action.

…BESSENT: “And Rob the other thing as Treasury who carries out the sanctions we can see is we are now seeing the rats fleeing the ship because we can see millions, tens of millions of dollars being wired out of the country, snuck out of the country by the Iranian leadership.”

“So they are abandoning ship, and we are seeing it come into banks and financial institutions all over the world.”

“And what we do at Treasury is we follow the money, whether it is through the banking system or through digital assets.”

“We are going to trace these assets and they will not be able to keep them.”

Everything we saw about the ruling hierarchy making bug-out arrangements last night is being confirmed this morning. The country, it is said, is ‘bleeding’ cash with the frantic exodus in addition to the blood from the wounds on bodies in the streets. 

…Meanwhile, the son of Iran’s Supreme Leader has reportedly transferred $1.5 billion to Dubai bank accounts as the Islamic Republic teeters on the edge of collapse, an indication that the ruling family may be preparing exit strategies. 

The United States treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, confirmed such a theory, noting on Wednesday that Washington is tracking what he described as a surge of capital flight by Iran’s ruling elite, telling Newsmax that “we are now seeing the rats fleeing the ship because we can see millions, tens of millions of dollars being wired out of the country, snuck out of the country by the Iranian leadership.” 

Mr. Bessent vowed to trace the huge sums and declared that Iranian leaders “will not be able to keep them.”

As Iran’s elite scramble to secure their fortunes, the region appears to be moving toward a far more dangerous phase.





What we haven’t covered is ‘the money’ and the bank crisis that many are saying precipitated this wholesale eruption in the streets to begin with. I thought I’d try to give you all a little of the background on that since we seem to be in somewhat of a news lull.

At one time, there was a bank in Iran called Ayandeh Bank. It was run by a man named Ali Ansari, a ‘well-connected’ Iranian businessman from one of the richest families in the country. Ansari had taken two state banks and merged them with a bank he already owned to form the new Ayandeh Bank. So, this is the first issue – this ‘new’ financial institution is run by nothing but cosy regime insiders.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s report, this Ayandeh Bank was a flashy self-lender and spender, and had plenty of help staying afloat using loans from the central state bank.

…Ayandeh offered the highest interest rates of any Iranian bank, attracting millions of depositors and borrowing heavily from the central bank, which printed money to keep the institution afloat, economists said. Like other troubled Iranian banks, Ayandeh had a large number of nonperforming loans, one of a range of factors that eventually drove it to failure.

Its largest investment was the Iran Mall, which opened in 2018. The project displayed an opulent excess that made little sense amid the stagnation in the rest of the Iranian economy. Twice the size of the Pentagon, the mall is a city within a city with its own IMAX movie theater, a library, swimming pools and sports complexes, along with indoor gardens, a car showroom and a hall of mirrors modeled on a 16th century imperial Persian palace.

Economists and Iranian officials said the project was an example of self-lending, in which Ansari’s bank effectively lent money to his own companies. When it folded, a report in the semiofficial Tasnim news agency, citing a top central bank official, said that more than 90% of the bank’s resources were tied up in projects under its own management.





All good pyramid schemes, whether built on your own money or someone else’s, come to an end, and such was the case with Ayandeh Bank. It went under late last year, along with $5B in bad loan losses. The timing couldn’t have been much more calamitous for the Iranian government, which not only had to eat its investment in that bank but had no way to recover from the losses after a year dealing with the new American president’s active hostility, wounds from a triumphant Israel, and a fierce decline in the value of their already besieged national currency, the rial.

…Late last year, Ayandeh Bank, run by regime cronies and saddled with nearly $5 billion in losses on a pile of bad loans, went bust. The government folded the carcass into a state bank and printed a massive amount of money to try to paper over all the red ink. That buried the problem but didn’t solve it.

Instead, the failure became both a symbol and an accelerant of an economic unraveling that ultimately triggered the protests that now pose the most significant threat to the regime since the founding of the Islamic Republic half a century ago. The bank’s collapse made clear that the Iranian financial system, under strain from years of sanctions, bad lending and reliance on inflationary printed money, had become increasingly insolvent and illiquid. Five other banks are thought to be similarly weak.

The crisis hit at the worst possible time. The Iranian government’s credibility had already been battered by a 12-day war with Israel and the U.S. in June that showed it couldn’t defend its population from attack. Its leaders had refused to budge in negotiations over the country’s nuclear program, putting sanctions relief out of reach. In November, Israel and the U.S. threatened to strike again if Iran tried to reconstitute its ballistic missile arsenal or nuclear efforts.

The country’s beleaguered currency, the rial, tipped into a new downward spiral the country had little ability to stop. U.S. enforcement actions had cut Iran off from its crucial flow of dollars from Iraq, significantly reduced its hard currency earnings from oil sales and put its overseas reserves of foreign exchange out of reach with sanctions.





Five other banks, which were part of the regime’s attempt to manage the aftermath of Ayandeh’s collapse, are now teetering on the brink of dissolution.

…Sepah Bank is widely regarded as the financial backbone of the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian army. 

If confirmed, this is not just an economic warning sign. It is a direct hit to the regime’s security, payroll, and repression machinery.

As the regime scrambled to keep the edges from fraying without their usual access to workarounds, like their labyrinthine network of channels for illicit sales, the burden fell on an already stressed-to-the-max Iranian population, whose anger grew as yet another example of the haves covering their losses on the backs of the have-nots played out.

The ‘austerity measures’ Tehran imposed weren’t going to affect a single mullah, and the people knew it. When the offer…well, bribe of that handsome $7 a month handout came, it was far too little too late for a population battered by no money, no food, no running water, and no power for the abuse they received in their daily lives.

…Iran’s economic collapse was years in the making but unfolded rapidly in recent months. The national currency lost 84% of its value compared with the dollar in 2025. Food prices rose at an annual rate of 72%, nearly double the average in recent years. The country is also dealing with an energy and water crisis so severe that President Masoud Pezeshkian has proposed moving the capital out of Tehran and closer to the Indian Ocean coast.

Wages didn’t keep up, and the fast-rising prices pushed ordinary Iranians to a breaking point. People said they could no longer afford food. With the value of the rial dropping by the hour, shop owners couldn’t figure out how to set prices. Importers were losing money even before they could put their goods up for sale. 

 “The Iranian middle class has been destroyed,” said a 43-year-old female artist and Tehran resident. “When you can no longer even try to obtain food, you have nothing left to lose.” 

While the government was spending money to wind down Ayandeh, it was cutting support for the public. The budget proposed by the government in December included a number of austerity measures. It called for the elimination of a favorable exchange rate for imports, the removal of some bread subsidies, and for imported gasoline to be sold at market prices.





WHEN YOU CAN NO LONGER EVEN TRY TO OBTAIN FOOD, YOU HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE

…The government tried to mollify protesters by introducing a monthly cash subsidy of 10 million rials per person—about $7, though it goes further in Iran—and vowing to crack down on price gougers. Iran’s central bank governor resigned in late December and was replaced by Abdolnaser Hemmati, the former minister of economy, who had been impeached by parliament last year as the country fell into its currency crisis.

It didn’t work. Protests got under way at the end of the year and escalated for two weeks, spreading to dozens of cities around the country. Thousands protested in recent days despite an internet blackout and a toughening government crackdown in which hundreds of people have been killed, according to human rights groups.

So Iranians hit the streets and have stayed in them, in spite of the most horrific and vicious violent assaults imaginable.

They have nothing left to lose.

The Iranian rial is in serious deep doo doo.

Time is running out rapidly for how long the regime can still print money to keep the banks afloat, to keep their shock troops and bodyguards paid.

They have also run out of friends.





I hope this has added another layer that helps focus the picture even more.

This, I would imagine, is another one of those myriad puzzle pieces Trump is considering before any action. If the banking system completely collapses in the next day or two, as it quite literally could, what then? 

What recourse does the regime have, and who within the country does it depend on to enforce their authority if they can’t pay them?

Does the hierarchy even hang around to find out?

This could very well all fall down around their ears – momentarily – without a single US missile having to be fired, with the threat of our assets already in place being enough to stop the killing just long enough to let it.

Just sayin’.

TICK TOCK

 


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