The recent collapse of the Argentine Peso and other emerging currencies is more than a warning sign.

Before Kitchen Confidential made him a celebrity, Anthony Bourdain was a real chef, working upscale New York kitchens at places like the Supper Club and Sullivan’s. Bourdain’s style is not to everyone’s taste, but he knows how to manage a restaurant crew. A chef, after all, is not primarily an artist, but a manager, facing the same set of organizational challenges — delegation, incentives, monitoring — as any administrator.

One of the most common fallacies of the new populists is to say that their model is the “Nordic” one and that those countries are successful examples of how “socialism works”. When I mentioned it to the Finnish Finance Minister Petteri Orpo at a recent ECR dinner, he could not believe it.

For most economists and commentators the main role of the Fed is to keep the supply and demand for money in equilibrium. Whenever an increase in the demand for money occurs — in order to maintain the state of equilibrium — it is held that the Fed must increase the money supply as a necessary action in order to keep the economy on a path of economic and price stability.

The Senate Banking Committee is set to vote next Tuesday on the nominations of Richard Clarida and Michelle Bowman. As I noted when both names were initially announced, neither’s history indicates any reason to think they will shake things up at the Fed. To his credit, Mr. Clarida did indicate during his Senate testimony that he strongly supports normalizing the Fed’s balance sheet and getting it away from direct credit allocation by purchasing non-Treasury assets.

Nomi Prins is a Wall Street veteran and expert on central bank mischief.

[Philosopher] Eric Mack [in his article “Permissible Defense”] uses a device employed by all too many libertarians—of holding the ideal free-market anarchist system or a limited government as virtually equivalent to the current State-ridden system. Thus, he points out quite correctly that isolationism makes no sense as a principle for a free-market protective agency; he leaps from there to the conclusion that, at least for an anarchist, it cannot be a binding principle for the State either.

The EU as a political construction is in a state of terminal decay. We know this for one reason and one reason alone: its core principle is the state is superior to its people. A system of government can only work over the longer term if it recognises that it is the servant of the people, not its master. It matters not what electoral system is in place, so long as this principle is adhered to.

In his early career, Mises was a vocal supporter of the free trade movement, and well involved in the policy proposals of the free trade associations in Europe. In his later years, he maintained his pure laissez-faire view of international trade, but focused more on the battle of ideas.