Iran International
After an 80-day shutdown, the Tehran Stock Exchange reopened on Tuesday under heavy state controls, with 42 major firms still suspended and reported curbs on large-scale selling amid uncertainty over war damage and corporate losses.
Trading resumed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) under strict and highly managed conditions, with parts of the market reopening while 42 major, mostly export-oriented companies remained suspended.
The restart marked a procedural return to activity, but within a framework designed to tightly control selling pressure and limit volatility.
Steel and petrochemical companies — traditionally among the most influential drivers of the TEDPIX index — did not reopen. These firms were reportedly damaged during the war, yet authorities have not disclosed the extent of the damage, the duration of production halts, insurance coverage details, financing arrangements or reconstruction timelines.
No revised earnings projections have been made public. The absence of such disclosures leaves investors without the information needed to reassess valuations in a post-conflict environment.
At the same time, sectors that did resume trading were already structurally fragile before the conflict began. The banking system had been operating with capital constraints and persistent balance-sheet weaknesses.
The automobile industry was loss-making prior to the war, and supply chain disruptions have further intensified those pressures. Capital market intermediaries are functioning in an economy experiencing near-triple-digit inflation, eroding real returns and complicating asset pricing.
The real estate sector is also under strain due to disrupted supply chains and heightened uncertainty over future economic conditions.
Beyond the selective reopening of companies, several administrative measures were reportedly implemented to prevent heavy selling. According to market reports and brokerage channels, institutional investors were restricted from large-scale share sales, and caps were reportedly imposed on major shareholders in certain symbols.
Some leveraged funds also faced selling limits, with reported restrictions such as 100,000-unit ceilings for particular funds. Meanwhile, a number of stocks were reopened without price fluctuation limits due to disclosure requirements, creating a segmented trading environment rather than a uniform restart.
These measures suggest that the reopening was structured not only to resume transactions but also to manage the behavior of the index. In Tehran, TEDPIX functions as a visible signal of economic stability.
A sharp selloff after the prolonged closure would have carried political as well as financial implications. Containing immediate downward pressure appears to have been a central consideration in the design of the reopening.
However, limiting supply and constraining sales does not eliminate underlying uncertainty. Without transparent disclosure of corporate damage, reconstruction capacity and forward earnings expectations, the process of price discovery remains incomplete.
Instead of allowing the market to fully reprice assets based on updated information, authorities have slowed the adjustment through administrative intervention.
The Tehran Stock Exchange is now formally open. Yet with key exporters still suspended, significant trading restrictions in place and unresolved questions about corporate losses, the market’s reopening reflects controlled stabilization rather than a clear restoration of investor confidence.
On May 19, 2024, a helicopter carrying Raisi disappeared in the mountains of Iran’s East Azarbaijan province. The final Iranian inquiry blamed bad weather, dense fog and atmospheric conditions, not sabotage.
But the image was too powerful to ignore: a leadership convoy moving through poor visibility, losing sight of itself, then trying to project a state still in control.
That is the better way to read Raisi’s death – as metaphor, not conspiracy.
The crash did not change Iran because Raisi ruled Iran. He did not. Real power sat above him, with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Revolutionary Guard, the security state and the regional networks Tehran had built over decades.
Raisi mattered because he showed how continuity was supposed to look. He was loyal, hardline, severe and predictable; a figure once widely discussed as a possible successor to Khamenei.
Raisi was not the Islamic Republic’s future. He was its rehearsal for a future that never arrived.
In May 2024, the system still seemed to have a succession plan, a regional shield and the patience to wait out its enemies. Two years later, almost every pillar that made Tehran look untouchable has been tested or broken.
The countdown had already begun on October 7, 2023.
Hamas’s attack on Israel opened a war that pulled Iran’s wider network into motion: Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen. For years, this was Tehran’s doctrine of strategic depth.
After October 7, that depth became a target map.
By April 2024, Iran and Israel had moved from shadow war into direct confrontation. Then, one month later, Raisi’s helicopter fell out of the fog.
The state answered with the familiar theater of mourning: coffins, black flags, portraits, clerics and commanders. The message was continuity.
But after Raisi, the funerals began to tell another story. One by one, they marked not continuity, but exposure: a system losing the people, places and networks that had made it feel protected.
His death forced a snap election. Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist in tone, won the presidency after a first round marked by record-low turnout. The system gained a softer face, but not a new center of power.
Then came the first great humiliation of the post-Raisi era.
Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, came to Tehran for Pezeshkian’s inauguration. Hours later, he was killed in the Iranian capital.
This was not only the killing of a Hamas leader. It was a message that even the patron’s capital was no sanctuary.
That became the sentence for what followed.
In September 2024, Hezbollah’s pagers and radios exploded across Lebanon and Syria, turning the group’s own communications into weapons against it. Days later, Hassan Nasrallah was killed in Beirut.
A movement built on secrecy and underground command had been pierced from inside and struck from above.
Then Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar was killed. Hamas remained, Hezbollah remained, the slogans remained. But the axis was bleeding leaders, territory, routes and confidence.
The deeper break came in Syria.
Bashar al-Assad’s fall in December 2024 was not just the loss of another Islamic Republic's ally. It damaged the geography of Iranian power: the route to Hezbollah, the Mediterranean opening, and the Qasem Soleimani-era claim that weak states could be turned into Iranian depth.
By June 2025, the war had moved to Iran itself.
Israel struck Iranian nuclear and military sites during the 12-Day War. The United States then hit the most fortified parts of the nuclear program.
For years, nuclear ambiguity had been Tehran’s shield. In 2025, it became a battlefield.
Outside pressure then met the inside front.
The protests that erupted in late 2025 and early 2026 were driven by economic collapse, repression and the old demand for a different political order. By January 8 and 9, the state answered with mass violence and an internet shutdown.
The Islamic Republic could still shoot, jail and terrify. But it could no longer persuade enough of its own people that it had a future.
Even shocks beyond the Middle East began to feel part of the same weather. The US capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026 mattered less as an Iran story than as an atmosphere: another anti-American ruler, once protected by sovereignty and distance, suddenly exposed.
Then, on February 28, 2026, the war reached the institution at the heart of the Islamic Republic’s power: the supreme leadership.
Ali Khamenei was killed in US-Israeli strikes. For a state built around velayat-e faqih, this was not only the death of a ruler. It was the breaking of an aura.
Mojtaba Khamenei was named Supreme Leader days later. The appointment was meant to project continuity. Instead, it made the Islamic Republic look smaller, more closed and more dynastic.
The revolution born against monarchy had passed its highest office from father to son in wartime.
And then came the strangest funeral of all: the one that could not settle itself.
Iran postponed Khamenei’s state funeral. Months later, even his burial remained unclear. For a Shiite revolutionary state that has always known how to turn death into power, the delay was astonishing.
The republic of funerals had lost command of its most important ritual.
The old model had four layers. At home, fear contained society. In politics, elections gave the state a civilian mask. In the region, proxies kept enemies away from Iran’s borders. At the strategic level, missiles, nuclear ambiguity and the Strait of Hormuz made the cost of attack seem unknowable.
Since Raisi’s crash, every layer has been damaged.
Fear has produced revolt. Elections have exposed emptiness more than legitimacy. Regional depth has been penetrated. Syria has fallen away. Hezbollah and Hamas have been battered. The supreme leader’s office has lost its aura of untouchability.
Hormuz remains Iran’s strongest card. But it also shows the trap. The strait gives Tehran leverage over oil, shipping and global markets; it also keeps Iran at the center of a crisis it cannot easily end.
This is not the story of a regime that has already fallen. The Islamic Republic still has prisons, missiles, commanders and a long memory for survival.
But it is also not the story Tehran wants to tell.
Two years ago, Raisi’s death was wrapped in the language of martyrdom and continuity. The state said nothing vital had been lost.
Yet what followed revealed how little room the Islamic Republic had left for error.
The crash did not start the chain. October 7 had already started the clocks. But Raisi’s death gave the years after it their image: fog, poor visibility, a convoy losing contact, and a state insisting the road ahead was clear.
Two years later, Iran is still falling through that fog.
The question is no longer whether the Islamic Republic can survive another crisis. It has survived many.
The question is whether it can survive the loss of the things that made survival possible: distance, fear, succession, sanctuary and the belief that time was on its side.
Prices for some dental implants have nearly doubled over the past few months, according to Farid Hashemnejad, head of the Iranian Dental Technicians Association, who said clinics and laboratories are struggling to absorb mounting costs while maintaining service quality.
“Some implant procedures that previously cost around 300 million rials (around $165) are now almost twice as expensive,” Hashemnejad told Rouydad24 on Monday. “In some areas, raw material prices have risen by up to 100%.”
Dental care in Iran has long received limited support from the social security system, leaving most patients to cover major treatment costs themselves. The latest increases add pressure to households, already grappling with years of inflation and declining purchasing power.
Hashemnejad said imported materials used in dentistry and dental laboratories have become significantly more expensive in recent months, although severe shortages have not yet fully emerged because clinics are still relying on older inventories.
“So far, serious shortages are not being felt because existing stock is still being used,” he said. “But with some items becoming more difficult to obtain, more problems may appear in the coming months.”
Iran, he said, remains heavily dependent on imported dental materials sourced mainly from China, along with Turkey, Japan, South Korea and several European countries.
While domestic production has improved in recent years, Hashemnejad said Iranian-made materials still cannot fully replace imported products across specialized fields.
“We would also prefer to depend less on imports, but the reality is that most of the materials we need are still imported,” he said.
According to Hashemnejad, prices for some imported materials used in removable dental treatments and laminate procedures have risen between 80% and 90%, while resin and acrylic materials used in prosthetic work have also recorded sharp increases.
Patients shift toward lower-cost care
The rise in prices is also changing treatment choices, with many patients abandoning implant-based procedures or internationally recognized brands in favor of cheaper alternatives.
“Naturally, when costs increase, the number of patients also declines,” Hashemnejad said. “This directly affects clinics and dental laboratories.”
He warned that continued price increases could eventually push part of the population out of the dental care market entirely, creating further strain for healthcare providers already facing weaker demand and higher operating costs.
“We will definitely have inflation,” Pezeshkian said at a gathering of public relations officials from state institutions.
“We are fighting and we must accept the hardship that comes with it.”
Some critics questioned why prices continued to rise, Pezeshkian said, but argued that economic pain was unavoidable under the current circumstances.
They want to have their cake and eat it too, he said, using a Persian idiom.
The war between the United States, Israel and Iran began with coordinated US-Israeli strikes on Iranian military, nuclear and government targets on February 28. Iran launched missile and drone attacks targeting Israel, the US allies in the region and their infrastructure, while tensions around the Strait of Hormuz disrupted global energy market.
Although direct fighting has eased amid ceasefire and mediation efforts, tensions remain high as disputes over Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions, regional influence and maritime security continue without a lasting diplomatic breakthrough.
The president also opened his remarks with an unusual comment hinting at a lack of control over his own movements and schedule.
“I myself did not know where they were taking me. Suddenly they brought me here,” Pezeshkian said.
Damage and shortages acknowledged
Iran, Pezeshkian said, had suffered serious economic and infrastructure damage and could not pretend conditions were normal.
“It is not the case that we have not been harmed,” he said. “We must take on a wartime condition.”
Attacks, he said, had damaged around 230 million cubic meters of gas infrastructure as well as power plants, petrochemical facilities and major industrial sites, including Iran’s largest steel producer.
“We cannot say the enemy is collapsing and we are flourishing,” he said. “They have problems and we have problems too.”
The president said the public need to lower expectations and reduce consumption in order to withstand the situation.
Oil exports and fuel production under pressure
Pezeshkian also acknowledged growing difficulties in exporting Iranian oil and securing revenues under sanctions and regional pressure.
“They blocked the way and we are not exporting oil either,” he said. “We cannot export oil easily.”
Tax collection, he added, had become increasingly difficult because businesses and trade sectors were under economic strain.
Pezeshkian warned that fuel shortages and inflation would worsen without tighter management of energy consumption, saying gasoline production had fallen after damage to production facilities.
“Our gasoline production capacity has fallen. They hit it,” he said.
According to Pezeshkian, Iran currently produces around 100 million liters of gasoline per day while domestic demand has reached roughly 150 million liters daily.
“Do we even have the dollars to import gasoline and burn it?” he said.
The president called for stricter management of water, electricity, gas and gasoline consumption, saying economic problems, unemployment and inflation would deepen without conservation measures.
A report by Peyam-e Ma documents a growing trend in which 40–60 square meter apartments are being split between unrelated occupants as rent levels outpace incomes and turn standard tenancy into negotiated cohabitation.
Conditions reshape tenancy norms
In one case cited by the report, a landlord in a central district of Tehran asked for a deposit of 1,000,000,000 rials (about $550) and monthly rent of 50,000,000 rials ($28) for a shared arrangement, alongside strict conditions including limited visitors, full-time employment, and no pets.
The minimum wage in Iran is currently around $90 per month.
Another listing involved a 50-square-meter apartment where the owner offered reduced rent in exchange for domestic work. The monthly payment was set at 70,000,000 rials ($39), down from 120,000,000 rials ($67) if cooking duties were included.
A separate case involved a duplex property being partially rented out for a deposit of 3,000,000,000 rials ($1,667) and monthly rent of 150,000,000 rials ($83), with cohabitation offered to another couple.
From coping mechanism to structural pressure
A deputy head of Iran’s real estate brokers’ association told Peyam-e Ma that shared housing can be understood as a lifestyle choice seen in other countries, noting its historical presence in Iran as well.
But the report highlights a widening gap between that framing and current conditions, with landlords increasingly using cohabitation models to cover mortgage payments and living costs, while tenants accept reduced privacy in exchange for affordability.
Exit from Tehran’s rental market
Brokers interviewed for the report say some tenants are leaving the capital altogether or returning to smaller cities as rents rise beyond sustainable thresholds. Others, particularly single occupants, are moving back into parental homes.
One housing expert quoted in the report warns that continued displacement from urban centres could accelerate informal settlement growth around major cities, describing it as an emerging phase of housing exclusion rather than a temporary adjustment.
Another analyst argues that prolonged multigenerational living has masked underlying demand for independent housing, particularly among younger Iranians delaying marriage or household formation due to cost barriers.
This suppressed demand, he said, is becoming more visible as household structures shift and single-person living increases, exposing shortages in affordable rental stock.
Rising pressure on tenants
Data referenced in the report from Iran’s statistics authority indicates that roughly 51 percent of Tehran residents are renters, underscoring the city’s dependence on the private rental sector.
With average monthly rents for standard apartments ranging between 180,000,000 and 270,000,000 rials ($100–$150), costs now far exceed minimum wages reported at around 166,000,000 rials ($92).
Inflation in rent prices is recorded at 31.1 percent year-on-year, but market participants in the report say this figure reflects affordability limits rather than easing pressure, as tenants are unable to absorb further increases.
Poverty exposure among renters
Refering to a parliamentary research, the report says that around 27 percent of renting households fall below the poverty line under conventional measures, rising to roughly 40 percent when housing costs are included.
It also adds that the majority of low-income renters are concentrated in the bottom income deciles, with Tehran accounting for the largest share.
The spread of shared housing is therefore presented not as an isolated social shift, but as part of a broader tightening of access to independent accommodation in Iran’s largest urban centre.
