Jared Malsin

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.

They're trying to fight a fire that has already consumed them.

Right.

So they have spiraled to pull in a wide cross-section of Iranian society.

You had protests in cities across the periphery, in all kinds of regions, in Balochistan, in the Kurdish areas, in Tehran itself.

Very importantly, these protests in the city of Mashhad, which is more religious, more conservative, which shows that

Some of the core constituents that would normally support the system as a whole, support the Islamic Republic, that those people are protesting.

That is why it is a situation that is challenging the system as a whole.