European Union lawmakers in Strasbourg have now agreed on their position regarding the digital euro, approving it in a vote on the 8^th of July 2026. With this position, the European Parliament can start talks with national governments on the details of the design and functioning of the digital euro. 

The ECB argues that the digital euro is required to preserve the benefits of cash in a digital age and protect Europe’s monetary sovereignty, while offering a fast, secure, widely accepted public means of payment. However, it is not a neutral or purely technological upgrade to Europe’s payments infrastructure. It is a political and technological project that may embed surveillance, monetary control, and fiscal dominance into the very structure of the currency.

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.