Iran Braces for a Budget Without Oil Revenue

Iran is drafting next year’s budget under the premise that oil revenue could fall to zero, with senior budget official Mohammad Ghasemi telling the government on Monday to prepare for that scenario, as the country appears to be weeks away from that eventuality.Iran has loaded no crude since August 25, according to the US Treasury, and the oil it held at sea outside the US blockade fell from 88.8 million barrels in mid-July to zero by mid-October. Chinese buyers pay one to two months after delivery, so Kpler expects that revenue could stop around mid-December. Oil accounts directly for roughly 30% of the government budget, according to Gregory Brew of Eurasia Group and Miad Maleki of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Maleki puts its share of total regime revenue at 50% to 60% once indirect income is counted.According to Chatham House’s Bilal Saab, “The Iranian leadership is betting that if it holds out long enough, those with the most to lose from this economic crisis – Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait – will press Washington harder to find an exit.”But Trump has settled, for now, on keeping the blockade in place without new strikes, and he says the Gulf states want the same. “Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and others, would prefer the status quo,” he said on Monday. Then, on Thursday, he said “we don’t need a deal with Iran” and removed Vice President JD Vance from the negotiations, closing the direct channel Vance had opened with a letter to Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Rezaei had welcomed the letter’s tone, then insisted that Washington accept Iran’s conditions first and said no enriched uranium would leave Iran.Mohammad Tabibian, who was deputy director of the Planning and Budget Organization under President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, told Shargh newspaper on Monday that endurance is the wrong measure of success. “Adapting to sanctions does not mean eliminating their harm,” he said. “A society can therefore gradually become poorer without experiencing a sudden halt to all economic activity.”So, an exit isn’t in sight, and Kpler puts Iranian oil production below 2 million bpd in the months before late October, down from 3.59 million in February, the month the war began. OPEC’s latest report puts Iranian output at almost half its pre-war level. The US naval blockade imposed on April 13 then emptied the oil Iran kept at sea. Crude and condensate held outside the blockade zone fell from 88.8 million barrels on July 14 to zero by mid-October, and another 43 million barrels remain stranded inside it.Maleki says Iran will run short of cash in December but will not collapse. “The December timeline is more of a cash flow kind of disruption, and not really a collapse state,” he told Fox News Digital in late October. He told Iran International that the serious trouble will start “when they can no longer pay the cost of buying and transporting the goods they are now importing over land.”Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, founder and CEO of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, calls it a recession. “Iran’s economy is not on the verge of collapse, it is simply experiencing a deep recession caused by an external shock,” he wrote on X on November 10, citing his foundation’s finding that the fall in non-oil output after six months of war was about one-seventh of Ukraine’s contraction after Russia’s invasion.Iran’s Statistical Centre put total GDP 10.1% lower year on year in the three months to June 20, with non-oil output down 4.6%, The National reported. Batmanghelidj also sees Tehran’s neighbours as a possible lifeline, writing a day later that regional countries “which can’t tolerate more instability” may “quietly support the Iranian economy, including by breaking the blockade.”Tehran’s plan for next year promises to keep paying salaries and pensions without printing money, but offers little to replace the oil income that paid for much of it. Ghasemi has put salaries, pensions and debt payments at the top of a three-tier spending plan and ruled out direct borrowing from the Central Bank. The government also plans to extend its Kalabarg electronic coupon system to about 45 million low-income Iranians, and is counting on oil deposit certificates, customs duties and tighter tax collection for revenue.Next year’s budget sets up a fight between a government that has to cut spending and a parliament that has a record of raising it. Last year the government proposed a budget only 2% larger than the year before, and lawmakers raised that to about 30%. The government sends next year’s budget to parliament between November 22 and December 21. “There’s going to be a fiscal squeeze, and there’s going to be pressure around the release of the new budget,” Brew told Fox News Digital. “There’s going to be economic unrest, potentially even economic turmoil as the government rolls out spending cuts.”Albert Baghzian, a Tehran economist, says the government should admit the deficit up front. “A deficit that can be foreseen should be written into the budget from the beginning,” he told Khabaronline on Tuesday. “When the government’s revenues do not materialize, it may turn to borrowing from the central bank or to methods that ultimately raise the monetary base and inflation.”Iran has not adjusted the minimum wage since setting it in March, while the prices of basic foods have more than doubled. Eggs rose 149%, imported rice 115%, milk 113% and red meat 104% since last December, Tehran lawmaker Hossein Samsami told Khabaronline, and the Statistical Centre put year-on-year inflation at 88.7% in the month ending October 22. The labour minister promised to review the minimum wage in September, and a member of the wage committee told the Mehr news agency this week that no review has been scheduled.Tehran-based economist Isaac Saidian told Al Jazeera that the government can survive this longer than its citizens can. “The real danger is that it could stay afloat on paper while passing the cost of doing so on to the public, leaving society poorer, eroding the middle class, widening poverty and weakening the country’s productive capacity,” he said.Samsami blames the falling rial. The dollar’s price on Iran’s open market doubled over the same period, from about 130,000 toman to 260,000 (one toman is 10 rials). The government also offers importers a cheaper official rate of about 189,000 toman. On October 21, the trade ministry told the Central Bank to limit that rate to 66 categories of goods, so importers of everything else now pay the open-market price of 260,000 to 270,000. “It is natural that in one or two more months, 50% inflation will be added to the existing inflation,” Samsami said.Hossein Raghfar, an economist at Alzahra University in Tehran, says the government planned for the rial to fall. Last year, he told Khabaronline on November 1, officials at the budget office discussed letting the dollar reach 270,000 toman if conditions did not improve. The Central Bank tried to slow the rial’s fall on October 3 by making $10,000 available to every Iranian with a national ID card, and within weeks the dollar reached 273,000 toman anyway. Raghfar blames domestic policy for 80% to 85% of Iran’s inflation and the war for 10% to 15%.Gulf commentators are split on whether the blockade is worth what it costs their own economies. Saad bin Tefla Al-Ajmi, Kuwait’s former information minister, backs sustained naval and economic pressure. “The Gulf states are indeed paying a price under this scenario. Their trade is disrupted, tensions persist in their airspace, and their projects are delayed,” he wrote in an article he supplied to Iran International. Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, told Iran International that Gulf governments “would like to see the regime weakened, but they don’t believe that the blockade serves their interests.”Tabibian rejects Tehran’s bet that it can hold out longer than Washington. He told Shargh that the United States is better placed to absorb economic shocks, and that counting on disruption in Hormuz or higher energy prices to force Washington’s hand is unreliable. “Why should we consider the suffering of our own people a success, simply in the hope that the other side suffers more?” he asked.By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.comMore Top Reads From Oilprice.com$7 Billion in Oil Debt Has Nigerian Banks Holding Back LendingFusion's Next Race Is Over Superconducting Tape, Not PlasmaGlobal Power Grid Expansion Surges 50% to Record High