This Iranian Bank With Reported Deep Military and IRGC Ties Is on the Verge of Collapse

Is Iran teetering on the verge of collapse? It’s likely at its weakest we’ve seen in a generation. It’s political and military leadership eviscerated by war, it’s lost control of its skies, as we saw with Operation Midnight Hammer, and scores of protesters have flocked to the streets. The economy is collapsing, and even with the Internet shut down, the popular unrest continues. It’s not been without a cost: thousands are reported dead, with ghastly reports of government troops entering hospitals to kill wounded demonstrators. Death tool estimates have soared between thousands and tens of thousands.

You’ve seen the videos of police stations and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps offices ransacked. Tehran is reportedly in chaos, with other major cities facing similar protests. Reports of martial law being declared in parts of the country are also percolating through on social media. One thing is clear: you know Iran’s regime is weakening when the main bank for the Iranian military and the IRGC is about to collapse (via WSJ):

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 dollars from Iraq, significantly reduced its hard currency earnings from oil sales and put its overseas reserves of foreign exchange out of reach with sanctions.