“He has made a mess, and now he wants to leave us,” Ahmad said of the president. But a passenger in the taxi named Mostafa interrupted. “No,” he said, “most of our leaders are at fault, but they are trying to blame everything on Ahmadinejad.”

Just a day later, on Wednesday, clashes erupted when riot police officers on motorcycles dispersed sidewalk money changers near Tehran’s main bazaar. The government has accused them of deliberately manufacturing the currency crisis. At the bazaar, an important trade hub, shopkeepers closed their shutters, and hundreds of citizens joined them in a protest against the bad economy.

While life seemingly returned to normal on Thursday, the outburst of public anger exposed the deep feeling of hopelessness that has taken hold among many Iranians.

Experts are divided about whether the crisis has been caused more by Tehran’s longtime mismanagement of the country’s economy or by the American-led sanctions, which have been imposed over Iran’s refusal to halt a nuclear program that the West suspects is a cover for developing weapons. Whatever the cause, members of the once-vibrant middle class have turned into cynics, many of whom say they might be alive, but are not living.

For Maysam, the son of a man who was killed in the Iran-Iraq war, a decade of relative prosperity and technological innovations had enabled him to travel widely and had turned him into a prominent blogger and critic of the system that his father had died defending. Instead of hoping to die on a battlefield, he had planned to run his own Internet start-up company.

But those dreams have been shattered. “We can’t even think of the future, of tomorrow, the day after, or the next week,” Maysam said. Foreign trips are out of the question, as even the price of a cup of coffee in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, or Istanbul — favorite destinations for Iranians — has tripled when calculated in rials. Parents of the legions of Iranians studying abroad are calling their children back to Iran, as rents and college fees in countries like the Philippines and Malaysia have become unaffordable.

“I have told my son to come home,” said Shabaz, 60, who is part owner of a printing house, adding that he had spent his life encouraging his son and daughter to study abroad. “We are all losing. His future is gone; I won’t ever witness his graduation; and he won’t find a job.”