In 2007, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, Iran's Colorful?!? You mean like Hitler, or Stalin, or Pol Pot?
At the time, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad and his colleague Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, even tried to persuade the other members of Opec to shift their reference prices for oil to the European currency, arguing that the greenback was fatally weakened.
A year on, however, and the Iranian government has had to live with a revival in the dollar's fortunes and it is the rial that is in the doldrums. The rial has lost about 10 per cent against the dollar during the past month, even rising above the important 10,000 to the dollar mark for the first time in its history. It has since strengthened slightly back to 9,820.
This has landed Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's government on the wrong side of public opinion, which views the rial's value against the dollar as a central indicator of its economic strength.
Although the rial has changed little if measured against a basket of currencies, including the euro and the pound, "people are only concerned about the dollar rate", says one economist.
In the aftermath of the Islamic revolution the rial collapsed, and the regime adopted a series of exchange rate policies in 1980s and 1990s by fixing at about half a dozen different rates against the dollar. But in 2001, a reformist government led by Mohammad Khatami officially adopted a policy of a managed float.
Yet successive Iranian governments, even before Mr Ahmadi-Nejad took office in August 2005, have followed an unstated policy of ensuring that the dollar traded at less than 10,000 rials.
Whenever the rate has looked close to crossing that mark, the central bank has injected dollars to bring it down again. But this time the authorities are choosing not to pump in dollars because the country's oil revenues, the main source of income, are plummeting.
Iran tries to receive its oil income in euros to avoid oversight by the US authorities, which could block the Islamic regime's money over the controversial nuclear programme and alleged funding of terrorism.
Experts estimate that about two-thirds of the country's $80bn foreign currency reserves are now held in euros, and government opponents have complained of a loss of about $5bn due to the European currency's recent decline against the dollar.
Mr Ahmadi-Nejad argues that the benefits of increasing euro share in the reserves still exceed recent losses.
"We have had both economic and political gains by shifting from the dollar to the euro because the dollar was hugely weakened but this [the current strength of the dollar] will last for a short period of time," Mr Ahmadi-Nejad said earlier this month, while vowing to run the country for a further three years even if oil prices fall to zero.
However, the drastic fall in oil prices will still put the government budget under great pressure next year, and may leave it no choice but to devalue the rial. Analysts say that they do not expect this to happen before the presidential election in June.
In downtown Tehran, the main centre of currency trading, traders say that the stronger dollar is a natural reaction to world markets.
They are, however, worried about the possibility of heavy-handed government interference — such as closure of their shops, which happened about 13 years ago — should the dollar strengthen further. "The government might accuse some traders of dollar smuggling, close their shops and urge people to buy hard currencies only from banks," one trader says.