Iran's free-market exchange rate reached between 189,300 and 189,450 toman to the dollar late on Tuesday morning, up roughly 1,000 to 1,600 toman over the day's trading, according to the Iranian rate aggregator Alanchand.com1. Iranians quote prices and shop in toman rather than in rials, so this is the number a Tehran household actually recognises.
Iran runs more than one exchange rate at a time. The central bank grants an official rate for designated essential imports, and everything outside that allocation clears on the open market, which is the number the aggregators publish and the number an importer pays once the official allocation is exhausted. Iranians do not buy their groceries in dollars. Their importers do.
Rice, animal feed, machine parts and the pharmaceutical ingredients that Iranian factories formulate into finished medicines are bought abroad in dollars and sold at home in toman, and the conversion happens here rather than at the official window. Feed and pharmaceutical importers tend to show a move first, because both run on thin inventories and neither has a domestic substitute to fall back on. A rate that shifts a thousand toman before lunch has repriced the replacement cost of a warehouse before the week is out.
OFAC, the US Treasury's sanctions bureau, let General License X1 lapse at midnight on Friday 17 July without issuing a successor, closing the last lawful channel for Iranian oil sales. The dollars that stand behind this rate are earned selling crude, and there is now no legal way to sell it. A household in Ahvaz never sees the licence number. It sees the shelf price, a few weeks later.
