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.

The United States has no urgency to cut a deal with Iran because the economic and strategic balance of power has tilted decisively in Washington’s favor: Iran is suffering a historic collapse in oil revenues, inflation at World War II levels, and a currency in free fall, while the U.S. is growing, creating jobs, and exporting record volumes of oil and gas.

Iran’s current crisis combines three shocks: corruption and regime mismanagement, war-related damage, and the U.S.-led blockade on crude exports. Oil exports have plunged from around 1.3–1.9 million barrels per day in early 2026 to roughly 0.2–0.26 million barrels per day in May, the lowest level in at least six years, wiping out about 1 million barrels per day of sales. At an oil price near 80 dollars, that implies a loss of roughly 2.5 billion dollars per month in hard‑currency revenue, starving the regime of its main funding source.

Governor Gavin Newsom and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani have been selling this week the same comforting story: the era of painful deficits is over, thanks to “disciplined” progressive budgeting.

Both are using a familiar toolkit of optimistic revenue assumptions, one-off fixes, and rebranding of old tricks to claim victory over structural imbalances that are very much alive.

Newsom’s May Revision for 2026–27 declares, “No deficit this year. No deficit next year” and “$0 structural deficit through July 2028.”

On paper, the revised plan lays out roughly a $350 billion spending plan for 2026–27 and says revenues are $16.5 billion higher than projected in January, driven mostly by the stock market and the artificial intelligence boom. Fascinating.

Net Zero and Statism Deliver Stagnation: How Interventionism Undermined Growth in Canada and the UK

Governments are terrible at picking winners and even worse at choosing losers. Net zero and interventionist “Keynesian” policies in Canada and the UK have proven that government intervention has created a worse outcome than anyone would have expected. The result is higher costs, distorted incentives, and weakened productivity growth, with increased dependency on fossil fuels to attend to peak demand, exactly what Austrian economists predicted.