Via The Economist, a look at how enthusiasm for post-sanctions Iran is being tempered by realism:

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.

Sanctions have indeed created pent-up demand, but they have also dried up the liquidity needed to finance it. The price-tags delegates place on Iran’s needs—$15 billion for its railways, $200 billion for its energy sector, $30 billion for tourism—look exciting, but paying for them is a different matter. Oil prices are down by half, sharply reducing revenues as well as the incentives to invest when reopening happens.

In the meantime nepotism, legal unpredictability and state companies masquerading as private ones will all bedevil business. “The corruption is still at unbelievable rates,” says Sharif Nezam-Mafi, one of the organisers of the Zurich conference. Financial experts insist that President Hassan Rohani remains on track to privatise the inhisarat, or state monopolies, which dominate the economy, are blacklisted by sanctions and often have close ties to the Revolutionary Guards. Mr Rouhani has sharply squeezed the money supply to cut inflation. And for all the sanctions relief, some American financial sanctions will remain. Western ministers travel back and forth to Tehran but no one yet knows when bank transfers will do the same. Some wonder whether the Supreme Leader’s call for “a resistance economy” could herald a new bout of protectionism.

Not all is gloom. Sanctions relief should release $50 billion-120 billion (estimates vary wildly) of Iranian assets frozen abroad. Repatriation from the diaspora might add $20 billion more. Mercedes and Volkswagen are said to be gearing up to replace Peugeot, which once ranked Iran as its second largest market, until sanctions forced its withdrawal. Coca-Cola is planning a major expansion in 2016. American grain exporters, who are already Iran’s largest supplier of wheat, munched merrily at the Zurich lunch. Politicians and businessmen again speak excitedly of the Persian Gulf. But the reality is that the Iranian phoenix may take some time yet to become airborne.