Iran Nears Economic Breakpoint: Iranian President Unable to Afford Manhattan Hotel

The Islamic Republic is so broke that its president couldn’t even afford his customary New York hotel suite during last week’s United Nations debate.On Tuesday, the Iranian currency’s value sank to a record low of 2.5 million toman to a dollar. Inflation is eating up the citizens’ income. An Iranian blogger recently compared the price of one sheet out of a tissue box to a large toman bill. Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian, told The New Yorker magazine that last week he slept at his United Nations ambassador’s midtown residence. It wasn’t clear whether the president crashed on the ambassador’s sofa bed. During past General Assembly annual sessions Tehran has booked two posh suites at the Millennium Hotel, across the street from the UN headquarters. Increasingly bleak signs are awaiting the Iranian economy. Within two weeks Iran will have “nothing left to trade for anything,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday. “They are going to make their final deliveries of oil to China, and then they will have nothing.” Oil watchers confirm that assessment.In June, when America temporarily lifted the blockade on Iranian oil exports, “26 Iranian-flagged tankers went to Malaysia,” a Singapore-based adviser to United Against Nuclear Iran, Charlie Brown, tells The New York Sun. “Now 20 of those tankers have completed ship-to-ship transfers and are sitting empty near Sri Lanka. The other six are still probably in Asia and still probably completing ship-to-ship transfers.” Meanwhile, Mr. Brown adds, the Communist Chinese have “definitely reduced their immediate demand for Iranian oil in reaction to the fact that there’s no more coming.” Beijing “has pivoted away from losing 20 percent of their crude oil imports,” he says. “Through the sheer power of the Communist party-controlled system, China transferred to other energy sources,” such as coal.Iran might find a way to evade America’s blockade of Hormuz, and export oil through the Caspian Sea to countries like Pakistan. Yet, losing its Beijing client is certainly a huge economic blow to the regime.Meanwhile in America, while prices at gas pumps rise and threaten Republican midterm hopes, the energy market, for now, seems to have weathered the storm. Before Iran started blocking Hormuz shipping, an average of 20 million oil barrels a day passed through that strait. That traffic accounted for a fifth of the globe’s energy supplies. Now, as America is investing vast and expensive resources in escorting ships through Hormuz’s southern corridor, traffic there is up — but far from pre-war numbers.Estimates of catastrophic hits to energy markets, though, have proven overblown. Fears that a crude oil barrel would reach the $200 mark or worse never materialized. On Tuesday, as supplies seemed to bounce back, indexes listed the price of an oil barrel below $90. Prices have dipped since Saudi Arabia announced repairs to its east-west pipeline last week. Iranian proxies had earlier crippled the line, seen as an alternative to Hormuz. On Monday President Trump reposted a Fox News diagram that tracked days in recent years that an oil barrel cost more than $100. There were 308 such days during Barack Obama’s presidency, 83 in President Biden’s White House stint, and only 24 so far in Mr. Trump’s second term.Much has been made of the Iran war’s parallel clocks: Would the Iranian regime collapse under American economic pressure before Mr. Trump cries uncle and cuts a deal to salvage his dwindling public approval poll numbers?Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, left New York on Tuesday, failing to have secured a deal to ease American economic pressure. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, denied an Axios report claiming that he had offered Iran sanctions relief and release of frozen funds in return for nuclear concessions. “I offered them nothing,” the president wrote on Truth Social Monday. While the regime struggles to pay its bills, the mullahs are known to care little about the population’s suffering. Regardless, Washington seems to bank on a bet that a breaking point is nearing.

Iran Nears Economic Breakpoint: Iranian President Unable to Afford Manhattan Hotel

Iran Nears Economic Breakpoint: Iranian President Unable to Afford Manhattan Hotel

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