President Masoud Pezeshkian’s administration has nominated US-trained economist Ali Madanizadeh as the new Minister of Economic Affairs and Finance on June 1, three months after the impeachment and removal of former minister and previous CBI governor Abdolnasser Hemmati.

Under Iranian law, the government had a 90-day deadline to introduce a replacement. Initial efforts were focused on persuading Ali Tayyebnia — a former minister under President Hassan Rouhani credited with reducing inflation during his first term — to return to the role. However, those attempts were unsuccessful, paving the way for Madanizadeh, a younger academic economist, to be proposed for the post.

Madanizadeh currently heads the School of Management and Economics at Sharif University of Technology, where he specialises in macroeconomics and computational economics. If confirmed, he will be the first Sharif University graduate to lead the ministry, a role historically dominated by University of Tehran alumni. Sharif is known in Iran as a local version of MIT, and has some of the top students in the country. 

Born in 1982, Madanizadeh holds a bachelor's and master's degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University, a second master’s in applied mathematics from Stanford University, and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, which he completed in 2013 before returning to Iran to teach.

Inside Iran, among economists, he is recognised for his academic distinction, having won a bronze medal at the 2000 International Mathematical Olympiad in South Korea.

Madanizadeh has also held several public-sector advisory roles, including as head of modelling at the Monetary and Banking Research Institute of the Central Bank of Iran (2013–2018), economic adviser to the vice president of the Planning and Budget Organisation (2018), and board member at the Information and Communications Technology Organisation (2020–2021).

A baptism of fire awaits the new minister, with the country's currency, the rial (IRR), remaining stubbornly low against the dollar, currently trading at IRR820,000, a shadow of its former position even twelve months ago. The country's brain drain has also siphoned some of the most productive future wealth creators to countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. To make matters worse, the country's coffers are being drained by the growing pension bill and 45 years of mismanagement. 

To tackle some of these systemic issues, Madanizadeh is expected to focus on aligning monetary, fiscal, and banking policies to address inflation more effectively. Building on the views he expressed in past interviews, he is likely to advocate for fiscal discipline, greater transparency in public finances, and reforms to address off-budget imbalances that undermine the effectiveness of central bank policy.

Reforming the banking sector—particularly through tighter supervision of credit and limiting quasi-fiscal lending—will likely be high on his agenda. He may also seek to introduce greater flexibility and coherence into the exchange rate system while promoting institutional tools, such as macroeconomic modelling and data-driven forecasting, to guide decision-making.

The success of these efforts, however, will depend on his ability to secure political support and overcome resistance from entrenched interests.And the track record of previous ministers does not bode well for the American-trained academic. 

Though not publicly outspoken, Madanizadeh has previously criticised government-administered price controls such as the fixed 420,000-rial exchange rate. In a 2022 interview with DEN Group's Ecoiran, he called for a shift toward an active monetary and foreign exchange policy at the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), accompanied by structural reforms in the banking system and public finances. Similar to the reforms currently ongoing in Argentina under the Milei administration, which is presently showing signs of success away from the command economy of the Peronists. 

“Monetary policy alone cannot succeed unless it is supported by reforms in the banking sector and measures to address both the budget and meta-budget deficits,” he said. “It will take time, but we must start before the imbalances deepen.”

He cited Russia’s post-2015 banking reforms and Chile and Turkey’s monetary restructuring efforts as examples of how central banks gained policy credibility following institutional corrections. “We must first fix the rules of the game so that monetary policy has room to be effective,” he added.

Madanizadeh’s nomination will now be reviewed by parliament, which must vote to confirm him in the role.