The obscure bank collapse that sent Iran into a tailspin

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The biggest harbinger that things were about to fall apart in Iran didn’t come from the thwarted anger of the country’s opposition or the frustrated hopes of young people hungry for more personal freedom. It came from the collapse of a bank.

Late last year, Ayandeh Bank, run by regime cronies and saddled with nearly $5 billion in losses on a pile of bad loans, went bust. 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. That buried the problem but didn’t solve it.

Instead, the failure became both a symbol and an accelerant of an economic unraveling that ultimately triggered the protests that now pose the most significant threat to the regime since the founding of the Islamic Republic half a century ago. The bank’s collapse made clear that the Iranian financial system, under strain from years of sanctions, bad lending and reliance on inflationary printed money, had become increasingly insolvent and illiquid. Five other banks are thought to be similarly weak.

The crisis hit at the worst possible time. The Iranian government’s credibility had already been battered by a 12-day war with Israel and the U.S. in June that showed it couldn’t defend its population from attack.

Its leaders had refused to budge in negotiations over the country’s nuclear program, putting sanctions relief out of reach. In November, Israel and the U.S. threatened to strike again if Iran tried to reconstitute its ballistic missile arsenal or nuclear efforts.

The country’s beleaguered currency, the rial, tipped into a new downward spiral the country had little ability to stop. U.S. enforcement actions had cut Iran off from its crucial flow of