Week in Brief 18.05.2018

Although unrelated to economy, we believed this good news would lighten up our newsletter. On Saturday, the Iranian women’s futsal team became the Asian champions. The team managed to defeat Japan 5 to 2 in the finals. The Iranian women’s futsal team had also managed to become the Asian champions in 2015. The athletes in order of appearance in the match were, Farzaneh Tavvassoli, Tahereh Mehdipour, Leila Khodabandepour, Fateme Arjangi, Sarah Shirbeigi, Fereshteh Khosravi, Fereshteh Karimi, Fatemeh Papi, Mahsa Kamali, Nasim Gholami, Nastaran Moghimi, Fahimeh Zarei, Fatemeh Etedadi, and Arezoo Sadaghianzadeh. Fereshteh Karimi was selected as the competitions MVP and Sarah Shirbeigi and Fatemeh Etedadi were chosen as the best strikers of the competition each with 9 scored goals.

Iranian businesses and Bazaar are quietly waiting for the outcome of the visits of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mohammad Javad Zarif, to China, Russia and Belgium. All parties of the nuclear deal have expressed their support to keep it alive as the U.S. has decided to leave it and re-impose the sanctions on Iran. A week after the announcement of the US decision, now the foreign exchange rate at the black-market is regaining its (relative) stability. While last week the Iranian currency reached as low as 74,000 IRR against a dollar, is now back to 58,000 IRR for each dollar. However, not much of activity is still done at Bazaar. Read about the atmosphere at Bazaar on our article on Handelsblatt, the German economic daily: „Der Markt sieht aus wie ein Schlachtfeld