While international businesses are waiting to see what will emerge from the nuclear talks in Vienna, Iran’s business community remains more optimistic about the outcome of the negotiations, though, in its own right, the country’s private sector is also in a wait-and-see mode.
There are a number of ways to gauge the expectations and perceptions of the Iranian business community, but the movements in the free market value of the US dollar are usually an accurate reflection of the overall trends. A closer look at the fluctuations of the free market exchange rate (graph below) in the past few months indicates that there is no anxiety in the hard currency market, and by extension, within the business community. Essentially, despite an inflationary environment, the Iranian rial has roughly maintained the same value that it had in September 2013, before the signing of the interim nuclear deal in Geneva.
