Jared Malsin

huge mall called the iran mall which is in northwest iran and is believed to be one of the largest shopping complexes in the world it has a hall of mirrors that is modeled after a persian imperial palace it has a car showroom it has movie theaters it has a library you know so it has like you know sports complexes it's sort of like a city within a city but here's the thing

You have this bank that's acting almost like a slush fund to fund this kind of garish shopping center that was a symbol of how these regime-connected elites are just moving this money around to enrich themselves.

What one of the senior officials at the Iranian Central Bank said last year is that Ayande Bank was operating a Ponzi scheme.

That is to say, they were loaning out more money than they could possibly repay.

And that's what you have in a Ponzi scheme, where you have a bank that is giving out loans that it cannot repay, essentially, and playing a shell game by moving that money around.

Money was leaving the country and Iranians themselves were taking their money out of the national currency, the rial.

They're dumping the rial, they're putting it in gold, in dollars, in euros.

One economist that I spoke to estimated that between 10 and 20 billion dollars in capital flight took place last year.

And it triggered this currency crisis.

The rial fell roughly 84% over the course of the year.

So it just heaped more pressure on a system that was already under a lot of stress.

It was bad.

You know, when you have a currency that loses 84% of its value in one year, your ability to go buy groceries is going to collapse.

I mean, one example that someone gave me is that the restaurants and shops, people had no idea how to put prices on their menus.

Because when you have a currency that's declining every single day and every single hour, people don't even know how much to charge for things.

It's cheaper not to even open your shop if you're just going to lose money on the energy and on the stocking your shelves and so on.

The government, led by President Zelensky, introduced this budget at the end of December that was essentially going to remove subsidies on bread, for example, on gasoline, and it pointed to the fact that the government was out of money.

When you're talking about cuts on subsidies to bread and gasoline, those are things that are going to really hit ordinary people hard.

— That was really the immediate trigger of these protests, because the government had to come out and say in numbers, OK, we have to cut back, we have no other choice.

But it's sort of too little, too late.