Dollar at 126,000 tomans and gasoline price hikes: a tsunami of inflation is coming

What he says

An English translation of the talk, which is in Persian. It was made with AI from YouTube's automatic captions and may contain errors; the Persian transcript is authoritative. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

0:01 Hello. It is Monday, 17 Azar 1404, December 8, 2025. The suspicious death of Khosrow Alikordi, a defense attorney for freedom-seekers and someone whom all political activists and political prisoners know well and have benefited from, has created a wave of concern that the regime has once again turned to killing its opponents. The regime has announced that he suffered a heart attack in his office, but people, his friends, and his family, apparently with various pieces of evidence, strongly say that the regime killed him. Among other things, signs

1:01 of beating are said to have been seen on his head and face, and Khosrow's brother has demanded that the footage from all 16 cameras in his office, which the security agents took away, be returned to the family without tampering. In any case, while offering condolences to the family of this dear man, as well as to all political activists and Iran's legal community, it must be said that this murder, or death, of Khosrow Alikordi is also added to the regime's record of misdeeds.

1:52 Yesterday, 16 Azar, was Student Day. In many of the country's universities, regime officials, from Mr. Pezeshkian himself to some Majlis deputies, heads of the branches of government, and others, each went to a university to give a speech. Despite all the preparations the regime had made, bringing in Basijis, controlling invitations, and so on and so forth, in many places the students' questions and actions caused trouble. For example, in Yazd, when the government spokeswoman, Ms. Fatemeh Mohajerani, was confronted with students' questions about filtering and Mr. Pezeshkian's promise to lift it,

2:53 and tried to evade answering, she was met with booing from the students. She left the podium and walked out, but the university president asked her to come back, and she returned and continued her speech, though in fact she had no proper answer for the students. Interestingly, Mr. Pezeshkian has stated: "I have ordered that the white SIM cards be made black, so that they understand what happens to those whose cards are black." Of course, I don't know whether Mr. Pezeshkian has such authority and will, and said this for propaganda purposes, or whether he has actually done it. But he should be told: instead of

3:49 making the unfiltered, so-called "white" internet cards black as well, why can't you make all the black ones white? Why can't you lift filtering so that in practice everyone can use unfiltered internet? What is interesting is that in the statements of students, on social media, and among various groups of people, a free internet and the lifting of filtering are referred to as a right of the people. This emphasis that freedom of information, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom

4:42 to choose one's own dress, and so on are the right of the people is one of the very good developments that has taken place in our society. In fact, instead of religious duty-centeredness, where religious governments speak of a set of obligations upon people based on religion, as if people are bound to carry them out, the people are speaking of human rights and the rights of the people, and of the rights that human beings have simply by virtue of being human, which, one could say, is the foundation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So, saying that it is the people's right, that the government has no right to filter the internet and block the free flow of information, or no right

5:41 to prevent the formation of parties or the publication of newspapers, or other matters that have gradually evolved in the world over the past two centuries and have been crystallized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its subsequent supplements, is based on people having rights simply by virtue of being human, and on the principle that the government has no permission to strip people of these natural rights. Now, 180 economists, university professors, and activists in various fields of economics, social sciences, and so on have signed a letter addressed to Mr. Pezeshkian and put forward a very clear recommendation. They told him:

6:41 Mr. Pezeshkian, make the budget both fair and transparent. Fair in the sense of stopping the allocation of budget to bodies that have no effectiveness whatsoever. They have been receiving money for years but bring no benefit to the public. They don't do anything in particular. A bunch of freeloaders have gathered under such-and-such names, especially those outside the government apparatus, in Qom, in Tehran, in the Islamic Propagation Organization, here and there. They said: eliminate these, look at their performance. It is not justice for taxes to be taken from the people, taken out of the people's mouths, and then given to bodies that are of no use to the people. Second, they asked for it to be transparent, meaning

7:39 that the budgets be made clear. If money goes to Al-Mustafa International University, which is under Mr. Khamenei's supervision, let it be made clear what it is spent on, what its budget line is, what it does, who receives it; let it go into the details and be made known to the public. The expression they used was: make the budget a glass room. Let the government be transparent and clear with the people, like glass. Let people see whose hands the money they pay, the taxes they pay, and the oil revenues and so on, end up in, how it is spent, and let the public be able to oversee it. This is the right thing to say, and Mr. Pezeshkian should be told that this is something practical, within

8:35 the government's power, and now, being the season of drafting the budget and sending it to the Majlis, he can implement this recommendation. Meanwhile, the open-market dollar rate passed 125,800 tomans today and is on the verge of 126,000 tomans. Thus it can be seen that the fall of the rial is still continuing at speed, and the devaluation of the country's currency, on the other hand, causes all prices to rise, and its main pressure falls on those with fixed salaries and wages, such as workers, employees, retirees, and a large part of the country's core population. Also, according to the government spokeswoman, from Saturday, 22 Azar,

9:36 that is, next Saturday, 5,000-toman gasoline will be offered at the stations. The logarithmic table they have devised is quite complicated when you read it: 60 liters at 1,500 tomans are to be allocated to each vehicle, 100 liters at 3,000 tomans, and after that 5,000 tomans; for brand-new cars, basically only the 5,000-toman gasoline is to be offered; free zones and government vehicles also at 5,000 tomans; and in short, dozens of different things have been said about motorcycles too in this complicated plan. But it must be said that this will neither solve the problem of high gasoline consumption, nor help the government's budget, nor is it supposed

10:36 to, say, pay subsidies out of it so that something reaches the people, nor will it solve the problem of gasoline smuggling, because 5,000 tomans is now about 4 cents per liter of gasoline, which in practice is no different from 3,000 or 1,500 tomans. In any case, it will not untie any knot in this issue of subsidies, especially energy subsidies, and the budget and so on. For a long time economists have constantly been recommending: help the lower income deciles, which now perhaps one could say are the bottom 5 deciles, in cash, so they can buy whatever they want themselves, but release the prices

11:34 so that in the market, supply and demand operate as they should, and in this way shut down the whole business of rent-seeking and rent-eating, or the subsidies the government pays, whose burden in fact falls on all the people when the government runs a budget deficit. This matter, which isn't very hard to understand, is resisted, because with these multiple exchange rates, a group that receives preferential currency makes huge windfall profits, and this business of price controls and so on is now entirely in the hands of the corruption network, and ultimately it is they who profit from it.

12:29 The film "It Was Just an Accident," made by Jafar Panahi, which also won the top prize at the Cannes Festival in France, has been nominated for 4 major Golden Globe awards: Best Drama Film, Best Foreign Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. If it wins an award here, the chances of "It Was Just an Accident" also winning at the Oscars are high, because many of those who vote at the Golden Globes are in fact the same people who vote in the Oscar Academy. So this filmmaker, who made this film without a permit, essentially as underground cinema,

13:26 is conquering international festivals and awards, while in Iran the prosecutor has requested a 1-year prison sentence and a 2-year travel ban for Jafar Panahi. Hoping for the victory of Iran and Iranians.