MARKET STRUCTURE

Market Structure

Market Structure

On 3 August 2010, Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will have been in power for five years, having contentiously protected a second presidential period in argued elections last year. In this short space of time, he has irrevocably altered the face of Iranian politics. But when Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, provided his endorsing to the then little-known head of Tehran in the 2005 presidential election, he was easily searching to refurbish cautious standards to the Islamic hierarchy, after eight years of a reformist - Mohammad Khatami - at the helm. Had Khamenei renowned the penalties of his conclusion, he may have considered better of it.

Ahmadinejad's accession to the presidency escorted in one of the most tumultuous time span in Iran since the Islamic transformation in 1979. Almost directly, Ahmadinejad set Iran on a collision course with the West. Just a month into his tenure, he announced Iran's “inalienable right” to make atomic fuel, restarting the uranium enrichment method which had been hovering by his reformist predecessor. He attracted farther argument by rejecting the Holocaust and being broadly described as calling for the decimation of Israel. From the outset, his hard-hitting and confrontational stance riled the worldwide community and set down Iran in deep water with the UN Security Council, which endangered sanctions. All inside 14 months of taking office.

Domestically, he consolidated his hardline, populist credentials, while infuriating the clerical establishment at the identical time, by asserting that the concealed 12th imam, who Shia Muslims accept as factual went into 'occlusion' in 874 and who will one day come back to save mankind, was really running the activities of Iran.

Plunging economy

More ruinous is the lasting impairment he has wrought on Iran's economy. His expansionary populist fiscal principles produced in rocketing inflation and critical deficits. During his first four-year period, ...