Tayyebnia Says Rial Revaluation Should Wait

Addressing renewed calls for dropping three zeros from Iran’s national currency, Ali Tayyebnia, the economic minister, supported the move. He, however, was soon to add that the time is not suitable for doing so.

“I think dropping the three zeros from the rial is a necessary measure that should be done in the future,” ISNA quoted him as saying on Sunday.

“We need to fully reduce inflation and make the economy more stable before lopping of the naughts from the national currency,” the minister added.

Earlier this month Hussein Qazavi, a deputy minister of economy, and Gholamreza Mesbahi-Moqaddam, a member of the Expediency Council, called for the parliament and government to create the grounds for revaluing the rial. The move is expected to help lift the efficiency of the currency and ease daily transactions, according to two experts.

Kamran Nadri, deputy director of Monetary and Banking Institute, also welcomes the move, since “it would make calculation easier and make the currency more resilient to inflation.”

Nadri went further by saying that since the revaluation would be costly and time- consuming it is better to drop even more zeros from the rial all at once.  “I think we should remove four zeros from rial.”

He emphasized that enhancing monetary markets is a key prerequisite for revaluating rial.

The policy was successfully initiated by several countries in the past: Turkey, for instance, lopped six zeros from its lira in 2004 as a way to get rid of decades of high inflation.

Although the official currency in Iran is the rial, most people use the term ‘toman’, which deducts one zero. A 10,000 rial bill therefore is generally called 1000 tomans.