That's the contradiction Prof. Steve Hanke walks into, and he opens with a number almost nobody's heard: 107%. Iran's real inflation rate, off Hanke's own high-frequency measurement, not the 180% Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent keeps repeating.
Hanke isn't saying Iran's fine. He's saying the people running the economic strangulation campaign can't get the baseline right, and everything built on top of a wrong baseline is guesswork.
Then he goes further. Sanctions, historically, don't crack the countries they hit. They weld them shut.
Cuba's his example. Decades of pressure that dug Castro in deeper instead of prying him out, because populations under outside attack close ranks rather than revolt.
Iran's absorbed 47 years of the same treatment, and Hanke argues the war handed Tehran cover to accelerate the one pivot Washington should actually fear: deeper trade with China, payment rails that skip the dollar, energy and mineral routes that never touch the U.S. system at all.
Home front, same improvisation. Inflation running 3.4% against a 2% target because the money supply is growing too fast, and rising bond yields now working their way into mortgages and into the cost of carrying $40 trillion in debt.
Over a third of personal income tax collections, Hanke notes, go to servicing that debt before a dollar reaches an actual government service.
His closer isn't really about Iran anymore. It's about a country, in his view, sliding downward in slow motion. Not necessarily losing to China, but no longer running anything resembling the playbook that built the lead in the first place.
So if the sanctions consolidate and the money supply doesn't lie, what's the plan actually meant to accomplish?
@steve_hanke
