This is John Batchelor, conversation with my colleague, Ben-Belablu, senior fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, watching Iran, the suspect nuclear weapons program, the Islamic Republic, making war on its neighbors, launching the murderer in Israel.

Right now is struggling with an economy that is broken.

Benham reports the real, the local currency, is now more than $800,000 to $1,000.

A collapse of currency and trust in the economy and the future for Iran.

And still the regime rants and attacks and plans and plots,

especially the risk of a nuclear weapon.

Here's venom to explain what's happened in Iran's economy these last weeks and months.

The way forward is not clear, but 800,000 means you fail.

More of this tonight.

Well, it's a currency that continues to plummet, and right now we're at 802, 801,000

reals.

Obviously, in Iran, they use this kind of social derivative of the real

the tomat, where they basically slice off one of the zeros. So about 82,000 instead of 802,000.

But nonetheless, this is a major economic shock because these numbers that we're citing now

are the lowest ever

recorded figures for the Rial relative to the US dollar in its entire recorded history.

So this is a major shock.

And second, because we know these numbers, not by virtue of these being the official government

exchange rate, because by the way, there's about two or three exchange rates in Iran,

depending on how you count, an official rate, which is the government rate, a subsidized rate,

which is for imports and exports, and then the unofficial rate, or sometimes called the black

market rate, which is the free value of the real relative to other foreign currencies like

...