Two Nights, 7000 Dead. At least.

r@raphaelbauer.com (Raphael Bauer) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:00:00 +0200

On Sunday, 28 December 2025, the traders who sell mobile phones in two shopping centres in central Tehran went on strike¹. That day the rial fell to 1.42 million to the dollar²; when the nuclear deal was signed in 2015 it had been 32,000. A trader who buys stock in dollars and sells it in rials cannot set a price in a currency like that, so the traders stopped selling. On Monday shopkeepers in and around the Grand Bazaar shut too. On Tuesday students rallied at Sharif, Amirkabir and other universities³. They were not chanting about exchange rates.

Nothing Inherent in Goods

r@raphaelbauer.com (Raphael Bauer) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:30:00 +0200

Between the eighth and the seventeenth of March 1892 a commission sat in Vienna to decide what the money of Austria-Hungary should be made of. Its most eminent member was a fifty-two-year-old professor of political economy who had spent the previous decade in an academic war and the previous year preparing for this question. His evidence, Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1934, “attracted the widest attention” and “even achieved what, for an economist, was perhaps the unique distinction of causing a temporary slump on the stock exchange”¹. On 2 August the empire created the gold crown by law; the new currency came into force nine days later and lasted until the end of 1924².

Freedom on The Prosperitist

Two Nights, 7000 Dead. At least.

Nothing Inherent in Goods