Free Iran:  The regime understands that its greatest vulnerability is the country’s economy.  Why can’t the West see this as well and focus on cutting off the regime’s access to Iran’s oil income as opposed to wasting time and resources concentrating all its efforts on the nuclear issue or engaging this regime?

A record boom in Tehran’s stock market will end in a spectacular crash that could trigger a prolonged depression producing multiple bankruptcies, mass unemployment, and acute economic hardship, analysts say.

The warning follows months of soaring share prices that have prompted officials in Iran’s Islamic regime to proclaim that the country’s economy is flourishing despite fresh international sanctions aimed at combating its nuclear program.

The Tehran bourse index passed 17,900 on August 30, compared to 12,537 points on the final day of the last Iranian year in March, following a sustained wave of stock sales and purchases. The upward trend has pushed the exchange’s total value to more than $80 billion, up from $70 billion in mid-July.

However, the bull market has been dismissed as a “state-created bubble” by seasoned analysts who attribute it to the deliberate buying and selling of assets by supposedly private companies that are in reality owned by organizations like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which has been playing an increasingly dominant role in Iran’s economy.

…”There is absolutely no rational explanation in a country where productivity has been falling in the last 28 months consistently, [where] every quarter profitability has been negative for 92 percent of state-owned banks, and the banking system is highly indebted, to see such a boom in stock prices,” Emadi warns. “They do not reflect the profitability, they do no reflect the confidence in the economy, so it tallies that it is the reflection of the injection of new demand and money. Obviously this is kind of a bubble. But it is a state-created bubble, instead of sort of a market-induced bubble.”

…The goal, Emadi believes, is two-fold: to encourage confidence in the economy and thereby prevent capital flight; and to prevent a banking collapse by persuading small depositors to keep faith in the banks.

“The government has acknowledged that the biggest front they are fighting in managing the country is economic, and in that aspect of crisis management banks are an early warning system,” he says. “When people feel really insecure about the ability of banks to meet their obligations, they pull out their money. We have seen this in Mexico, in Argentina, in South Africa. They pull out their deposits, convert it into hard currency and buy gold. If this happens, it’s conceivable that within a couple of months we could see very big state-owned banks going bankrupt and that would be an outcome that government really would not be able to manage and cope with.”