US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday that the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran was responsible for collapsing the country’s economy and sparking the protests and unrest that began at the end of December.
At the Treasury, what we have done is created a dollar shortage in the country … 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,” Bessent said.
“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,” he added.
Bessent said that he outlined his plan to destroy the Iranian economy in a speech he delivered at the Economic Club of New York in March 2025, where he said the goal was to “collapse [Iran’s] already buckling economy” and “make Iran broke again” by targeting its oil sales and efforts to get around US sanctions.
“Making Iran Broke Again will mark the beginning of our updated sanctions policy. Watch this space. If economic security is national security, the regime in Tehran will have neither,” Bessent said at the time.
A day before his speech at the Economic Club, Bessent met with Israeli Foreign Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the main proponents of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the Israeli official in charge of expanding illegal Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
