In the lead-up to today’s negotiations in Baghdad, Iranian officials have labored to insist that they do not need a nuclear agreement with the international community and that their economy can survive more punishment.

But one look at the recent gyrations of Iran’s currency suggests otherwise.

The rial tanked early this year after the Barack Obama administration signed a law barring US banks from any dealings with foreign banks that do business with Iran’s Central Bank. The currency sank on so-called unofficial markets to 20,000 to the dollar — half what it was a year ago — before stabilizing at about 16,000 after a new round of nuclear talks in Istanbul in April. An apparently successful visit to Tehran earlier this week by Yukiya Amano, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, boosted the rial a bit more.

“It’s a very emotional reaction,” Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, a specialist on the Iranian economy at Virginia Tech, told Al-Monitor. Iranians are converting their cash to hard currency to horde or sending it out “to children for education or to buy property” because they worry about sanctions and even military action, he said.