women's rights has been always an issue in iran, again a trend-setter in the region. >> charlie: haleh, thank you so much, glad to see you again albeit via satellite. glad to have you here. abbas, thank you for traveling from stanford university to join us this morning. we thank you very much. ♪ ♪ captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

. >> i have to agree with haleh. central bank of iran came out with a report last week saying that the economy is in crisis and that the number of bounced personal checks and business checks was 38% higher this year than last year. almost 2,000 checks bounced so he can kind of sugar-coat the sanctions and the economic crisis, but even inside iran there are official organizations coming out and saying "here are the statistics, we are having problems, companies are closing down, we can't import, we can't export, we can't open letters of credit," these are tangible problems they're facing. >> one of the ayatollahs -- probably the second most important ayatollah -- the ayatollah that leads the prayers in gom said last week that the statistics that mr. ahmadinejad gives about unemployment, about inflation are all bogus. he said that people know these are bogus figures, quit giving them because you're undermining the credibility of the entire government. 40% of the entire liquidity of the iranian economy is now in bad chec

. >> i have to agree with haleh. central bank of iran came out with a report last week saying that the economy is in crisis and that the number of bounced personal checks and business checks was 38% higher this year than last year. almost 2,000 checks bounced so he can kind of sugar-coat the sanctions and the economic crisis, but even inside iran there are official organizations coming out and saying "here are the statistics, we are having problems, companies are closing down, we can't import, we can't export, we can't open letters of credit," these are tangible problems they're facing. >> one of the ayatollahs -- ob

and i'm joined by haleh esfandiari, the director of the middle east program at the woodrow wilson international center for scholars. and karim sadjadpour, an associate at the carnegie endowment for international - elcome to both you. kareem, starting with you, what's known about what led to the release today? >> i think a few points worth mentioning. first is that there's no evidence against these three young hikers. the iranian government detained them august of 2009. they stopped interrogating them a couple months after their detention so i think when you talk to people connected to their lawyers in tehran, it's clear that the government didn't have any evidence against them. second, she has a health concern. she found a lump on her breast. i think the regime certainly didn't want to be put in a position where they would be responsible for her health. i'm not convinced that president ahmadinejad was responsible for her release, but i am convinced he will take credit for her release and try to spin it in a way to project himself as being a magnanimous, reasonable guy ahead of his visit to the

could you haleh some of that? >> -- could you highlight some of that. >> it is going to have to happen over time. it will not happen in a week or three months. we will not know if it will be enough. this is something we will have to be pursuing over a sustained period of time. become a nation of the simi- annual exchange rate report, the meetings of the g20 that happened three or four times a year provide other benchmarks and timetables. we are using every approach we can find. we are using the img to reinforce the basic case that this is a global problem. we are trying to make sure that china understands that this is something the world economy has a great stake in. it is not just us. even if it were only us, we would want them to change their practice. i think that that has significant potential. i do not think that, on its own, it will change behavior. ultimately what will change behavior is for china to decide that it is in their interest to protect intellectual property so that their inventors had the same pr