Ahmadinejad Returns from New York0555 GMT: For the first time in many days, it is hard to find a headline story from Iran. President Ahmadinejad's five-day trip to New York has ended with an understated note of his return to Tehran. There have been flutters this week about impeachment of the Minister of Sport and a Parliamentary interrogation of the President, but no sign of the pressure today. No one is saying anything about last weekend's imprisonment of the two children of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani. The nuclear issue had grabbed attention when the env oy to the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that Iran had offered to give up enrichment of 20% uranium in return for an easing of sanctions, but the story ebbed when Ali Asghar Soltanieh insisted, "I didn't say that."
Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's theatrical presentation at the United Nations of a "red line" that would bring an attack on the Islamic Republic --- verging on the cartoonish when he displayed an Acme-like caricature of an Iranian bomb --- did not bring a response. Fars' English edition, which can usually be relied upon for statements from the Iranian military defying and taunting the "enemy", is silent --- instead it leads with the proclamation, "Iran, Cradle of Tourist Sights".
However, there is one continuing story worth noting. This week has been notable for the renewed decline of the Iranian currency. The Central Bank's attempt to prop up the Rial --- worth less than half its value of September 2011, with a gap of more than 100% between the official and open-market rates --- through the injection of foreign reserves into a new "trade room" had no effect. Instead, the Rial sank almost 10% vs the US dollar since Sunday. Its all-time low was more than 27000:1 vs. the US dollar on Thursday, before it closed trading at 26790:1.
Those numbers put into stark relief the cheerleading of State news agency IRNA that the Government had put a "record level" of foreign currency into the market. The reality, as a Grand Ayatollah noted on Thursday, is that the country is caught in a spiral of a declining Rial feeding inflation, which further erodes the currency, which in turns fuels another rise in prices....
The good news for the Islamic Republic? There will be no currency headline today, as it is the Iranian weekend.
Posted via email from lissping
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