U.S. Treasury chief Scott Bessent warns Iranians to stockpile fuel, predicts economy will shrink more than 25%

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Iranians to stock up on gasoline and heating fuel and predicted the country’s economy would contract by more than 25% in the year to March 2027, as Washington intensifies its campaign to isolate Tehran economically.

In an interview with Iran International’s Kambiz Tavana in Washington on Monday, Bessent said Iran had no oil being shipped at sea and that no crude had been loaded at Kharg Island since August. Ship-tracking and satellite data have also shown Iran’s principal crude terminals largely inactive in recent weeks.

Bessent said he believed Iranian authorities were concealing the rial’s true value and estimated it had fallen beyond 3 million to the U.S. dollar. Iran’s open-market rate was around 2.7 million rials per dollar on Monday, making his figure an estimate rather than the published market rate.

He forecast an economic contraction of more than 25% between March 2026 and March 2027, comparing it with the post-Soviet collapse. That projection is substantially more severe than the IMF’s latest forecast, which expects Iran’s economy to shrink 7.6% in 2026.

Bessent also contrasted Iran’s economic trajectory with Türkiye’s, saying Iran’s economy was larger 47 years ago but Türkiye’s is now several times bigger. World Bank-based data broadly supports that long-term reversal, although the precise ratio depends on the measure and exchange rates used.

“My advice to the Iranian people would be: don’t pay your taxes,” Bessent said. He also urged households to fill fuel tanks and secure heating supplies before winter, predicting major shortages. Those warnings were his assessment; no independent forecast establishing the scale of the shortages was cited.

Bessent said Washington’s goal remained to force Iran back to negotiations and offered potential sanctions relief to individuals who cooperate with U.S. authorities. He said intermediaries holding money for Tehran could qualify for rewards of up to 30% of recovered funds under Treasury programs.

He argued Iran would receive a far different international response if it renounced any pursuit of nuclear weapons, while describing senior Revolutionary Guard commanders as isolated “like rats in a sewer pipe” and saying Iran’s supreme leader was increasingly cut off from conditions facing ordinary citizens.