TEHRAN – Iranian Finance and Economic Affairs Minister Farhad Dejpasand said that the government is going to continue implementing development programs to help flourishing the capital market, ILNA reported.

“The stock market situation is not measured only by the fluctuations of its index. The Iranian stock exchange is in the process of becoming a modern stock market,” Dejpasand said.

The Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE)’s main index (TEDPIX) has dropped nearly 600,000 points in less than two months and the shares of some companies have faced a loss of up to 70 percent.

Factors like the increase in the number of members, the growth of the value of transactions, and the expansion of instruments are also indicators of a deepening and growing trend in the market and the index should not be the only factor for evaluating a market, the minister said.

Dejpasand pointed to his ministry’s efforts for offsetting the budget deficit and funding development projects in the current year and said the shares of government-owned companies worth 330 trillion rials (about $7.85 billion), as well as 900 trillion rials (over $21.4 billion) worth of treasury bonds, were issued in the first half of the current Iranian calendar year (March 20-September 21).

Raising funds through the debt market is seen as critical for the government saddled with deep budget holes that have become bigger due to the coronavirus pandemic, collapsing oil prices, U.S. sanctions, and loss of oil export revenue.

Dejpasand had previously said the government may not be able to realize 1.4 quadrillion rials ($33.3 billion) of its projected revenue in the current fiscal budget.

TEDPIX had hit the record high of two million points on August 2, and while it had been experiencing an unprecedented trend of rising over the recent months, it witnessed several drop days in over seven weeks.

While Iran’s stock market has not received any external shocks such as those form the foreign currency exchange rate, inflation, parallel markets, and international issues, some internal factors have caused the recent drops in this market.

EF/MA