How the Iranian Economy Actually Works

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:18)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:23)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:24)
Tracy, it's now July 28th, and the Iran War continues to go on. And it's sort of extraordinary, the fact that in the beginning, here was this thing that was going to be, if it persisted, sort of cataclysmic, perhaps, for the global economy, and particularly with related to oil prices. And yet on a sort of day-to-day basis, it's not even necessarily the biggest headline news that most people are talking about.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:50)
People get used to a lot of things very quickly. I mean, it still has the potential to be catastrophic at some point in time, but you're absolutely right, we've gone months now since... When did this start? In March, right?

**Yeganeh Torbati** (1:00)
Yeah, the very beginning of March.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:01)
Yeah, months now with a war, which technically hasn't even been declared a war. It's an operation, is that what they're calling it? A military operation.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:11)
I think it's been a long... People talk about, you know, the forever war.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:14)
Yeah.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:15)
I think the last... It's been a long time since America actually ever acknowledged that it was in a capital W war.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:21)
Very true. But it does kind of vex the question about what happens when all of this is over, right?

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:27)
Yeah, right. I mean, hopefully it ends one day. And I have to say, so obviously we talk about oil a lot when we talk in terms of economics. I have to admit, you know, it's funny, we've done multiple episodes about the Iranian stock market, which is a fascinating topic. But other than the fact that obviously Iran produces a lot of oil, I actually like basically know nothing about the Iranian economy. Like the day to day, what a typical middle class family.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:54)
There's some things I know. So there's oil.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:56)
Yes.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:56)
There's Iranian cars, famously, which I would be interested in experiencing one day. Not necessarily buying, but experiencing pistachios.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:05)
I was going to say, so like pistachios like nuts, I imagine. But like what this sort of job market is, what a day to day, what's out there and, you know, whatever the Iranian equivalent of LinkedIn or indeed.com is, like what people do, what people want career-wise, all of these things. Because there's an Iranian stock market, obviously, you know, presumably there are like startups and companies that one day want to list, but I don't know what any of them do. I have so many questions, I guess, about like what a quote normal Iranian, let's imagine the war ends and also there aren't sanctions, right? What would an Iranian?

**Tracy Alloway** (2:44)
Well, this is my point, because at various points in time previously, you have had these bursts of optimism about the opening up of the Iranian economy, the lifting of sanctions. It's one other thing I know, again, not much, but one thing I know is it's a huge economy, right? With our previous Iranian stock market guest, the size of Turkey, right? Yeah, it's a really big economy. And so what happens if that starts to open up? Can it open up? Are we going to see what happened previously, where it kind of starts to open up and then it shuts down again? I don't know.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:15)
Several months ago, there was some random night where I was clicking on random Wikipedia links.
And I was like, I wonder what Ahmed Inajad's economic policy platform was when he ran for president for the first time. I started clicking on his campaign. I was like, I wonder. And it seemed kind of vague. And he had some, I wish I could remember the slogan. It was really good. It was something like, if we imagine it, we can do it. It was like the most inoffensive sort of like domestic policy agenda slogan. And I couldn't really find that more specific. But you have elections, et cetera. What do they run on? What do they, where do they stand on taxes? All these questions about sort of like, quote, normal, unquote, economic life in Iran.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:56)
Is that your way of saying that you want to talk about the political economy of Iran?

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:59)
I want to talk about the political economy and the even regular economy of Iran. Anyway, I'm very excited to say we do in fact have two perfect guests on who will teach us much more about this. We're going to be speaking with Yeganeh Torbati, Iran correspondent for The New York Times, as well as Bozorgmehr Sharafedin. He's the head of digital at Iran International. So both of you, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.