It was a historic day for shares in Iran's equity market on Monday.
The primary cause of the excitement is simple yet groundbreaking: The foreign currency exchange market is officially liberalized.
For over four months, the government insisted on a policy of fixing the rial to enforced rates against the US dollar, mandating large exporters to sell their forex earnings at predetermined prices and outlawing any trade at bureaux de change.
Now steel and petrochemical exporters, which constitute about half of Tehran Stock Exchange and Iran Fara Bourse, are free to sell their earnings on the secondary foreign exchange market at negotiated rates, the Central Bank of Iran's Governor Abdolnasser Hemmati announced.
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