Not so fast

ACROSS Europe, businessmen pack conference halls to discover how to unlock Iran’s vast potential after three decades of isolation. Four hundred of them piled into a hotel in Zurich on August 27th for a day of briefings which, if on the subject of other similar-sized countries, might attract 50. Others are filling the flights to Iran. Austria’s president is planning to take 240 businessmen with him when he visits later this month. “Welcome to a country with the population of Turkey, the size of western Europe with the world’s largest reserves of gas,” gushed a speaker at the Zurich event. Not only would they enjoy access to Iran’s 80m people, but to a hub for trading with hundreds of millions more in Iran’s troubled neighbours.

Why, then, are the Iranian markets so glum? The Tehran stock exchange, which rallied after the interim nuclear deal in Lausanne in April, stuttered and fell after the final one in Vienna in July. Businessmen there moan of unshiftable inventories and sharply overdrawn balance-sheets. Property prices and construction are flat. “Outside Iran there’s hubris, inside there’s misery,” says a London-based Iran consultant.