US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated on 5 February that Washington helped spark recent protests and riots in Iran by creating a US dollar shortage, leading to the collapse of a major and runaway inflation.
“What we have done is created a dollar shortage in the country,” Bessent said while testifying before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday.
“It came to a swift and, I would say, grand culmination in December, when one of the largest banks in Iran went under. There was a run on the bank,” he added.
“The central bank had to print money, the Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”
Bessent described the artificially created dollar shortage as part of US President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran that was launched after his return to the White House in January 2025.
The campaign included efforts to drive Iran’s oil exports “down to zero.”
Amid the US dollar shortage, Iran’s Ayandeh Bank collapsed in October, helping spark the anti-government protests two months later, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
The bank collapsed after losing $5 billion on bad loans to government-backed projects.
Ayandeh had attracted deposits from millions of ordinary Iranians by offering unusually high interest rates, creating what one Iranian oversight official allegedly described as a “Ponzi scheme.”
“The government folded the carcass into a state bank and printed a massive amount of money to try to paper over all the red ink,” WSJ claimed.
This led to the collapse of the rial, Iran’s currency, sparking massive capital flight.
“We have seen the Iranian leadership wiring money out of the country like crazy,” Bessent told senators on Thursday, claiming that “they know the end may be near.”
On 20 January, the Treasury secretary stated in an interview that US sanctions deliberately devalued Iran’s currency and “this is why [Iranians] took to the streets.”
“This is economic statecraft, no shots fired,” Bessent added
After the protests over the currency collapse in Iran began in December, Mossad-organized gangs began attacking protestors, security forces, government buildings, and mosques.
Iranian police arrested rioters and protest organizers, including some being paid from abroad and others found in possession of weapons and explosives.
Iranian police chief Ahmad Reza Radan explained that the protests initially “were legitimate economic protests by market traders,” but “later turned into riots.”
“We started two days ago arresting those who incite riots,” Radan said last month while speaking on Iranian television. He noted that some of them confessed to receiving payments in dollars, suggesting the protests are being supported by foreign NGOs or intelligence agencies.
Israeli media acknowledged that the Mossad elements were active in the protests, riots, and anti-government attacks.
Militants belonging to Kurdish separatist groups in northern Iraq also crossed the border into Iran to join in on the anti-government violence taking place across the country, sources told Reuters on 14 January.
For years, Iran faced cross-border attacks from Kurdish separatists belonging to the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) and other Kurdish militant groups.
Trump and his allies in Israel have sought to use fabricated claims of Iranian security forces killing peaceful protesters as a pretext to initiate a new war against Iran.