Iran’s swelling floating oil stockpile is the evidence of a deeper problem. The country has become an unreliable, opaque, and politically fragile supplier whose barrels are increasingly treated as distressed cargoes rather than a dependable energy supply.

As of July 1, more than 58 million barrels of Iranian crude and condensate were sitting on the water, according to Kpler. More than 90% of those volumes had no clear destination, with many tankers marked only as “for orders” or assigned vague routes such as Singapore, a frequent waypoint for ship-to-ship transfers that obscure the final buyer and cargo origin. At least 20 million barrels had already been idling in Asian waters for a week or more, an extraordinary figure for a producer that wants to present itself as a relevant and stable exporter.

Japan’s yen crisis exposes the long‑running failure of the Keynesian strategy that has dominated the country’s economic policy: chronic deficits, exploding public debt, and engineered inflation are now eroding Japan’s purchasing power, competitiveness, and monetary stability.

For decades, many mainstream analysts pointed to Japan as proof that a rich, “monetarily sovereign” country could keep an extremely high public debt without relevant consequences. The argument was simple: as long as the state can issue its currency, it can always print whatever is needed to cover deficits, refinance debt, and support public spending.

The Cuban dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel’s recent admission that Cuba’s generalized price caps failed to contain inflation, generated shortages, encouraged illegal markets, and reduced tax revenues is another confirmation of a much older economic lesson: price controls do not solve inflationary pressures, and they intensify the distortions they are meant to prevent. The Cuban case is especially revealing because the criticism comes not from ideological opponents but from the regime that imposed the controls and later conceded their failure.

In most countries, a minor airline with a tiny market share would never shake the political system. In Spain, Plus Ultra has done exactly that.

A controversial bailout granted in 2021 has now exploded into a full-blown criminal investigation involving alleged money-laundering networks linked to Venezuela and the formal charging of former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who rejects the accusations and denies any misconduct, promising full cooperation with the law.

In March 2021, the Spanish government approved a 53-million-euro rescue package for Plus Ultra, using a special pandemic fund meant to support “strategic” companies.

On paper, the decision looked odd from day one. Plus Ultra was a small carrier with a negligible share of Spanish air traffic, only one aircraft actually operating at the time, and a fragile financial position that pre-dated Covid.