If Marine Le Pen wins France's presidential elections in May, all talk of punishing Britain for the outrage of Brexit will become irrelevant.

French diplomacy will pirouette overnight under a National Front (FN) leader. The Élysée Palace will seek an Entente Cordiale with the British, offering a bilateral alliance on new foundations.

It will then be the European Union that faces an existential choice: whether to reinvent itself as a loose federation of nation states, or succumb to galloping disintegration

"What is the point in punishing a country? It is senseless, unless you think the EU is a prison, and you are condemned if you escape. I want to rebuild our damaged relations with the United Kingdom," she told me in an interview yesterday (02/15).

"France is the political heart of Europe, and the moment we leave the euro the whole project collapses," said Ms Le Pen, as she leans across the table in her tiny office in the European Parliament with a glint of mischief.

"A whole psychological framework is breaking down. I think 2017 is going to be the year of the grand return of the nation state, the control of borders and currencies," she said.  Hearing her, you can’t help but think of Donald Trump.

Last year (March 22, 2016), eight members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a demand that their Muslim staffers be granted access to top secret classified information.

The signatories to the letter were Andre Carson (D-IN), Luis Guiterez (D-IL), Jim Himes (D-CT), Terri Sewell (D-AL), Jackie Speier (D-CA), Mike Quigley (D-IL), Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Patrick Murphy (D-FL). All the signatories were Democrats.

Some had a history of attempting to undermine national security.  Two of them have been linked to an emerging security breach.

The office of Andre Carson, the second Muslim in Congress, had employed Imran Awan. As did the offices of Jackie Speier and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL); to whom the letter had been addressed.

Imran Awan and his two brothers, Jamal and Abid, are at the center of an investigation that deals with, among other things, allegations of illegal access.  They have been barred from the House of Representatives network.

A member of Congress expressed concern that, “they may have stolen data from us.”

All three of the Pakistani brothers had been employed by Democrats. The offices that employed them included HPSCI minority members Speier, Carson and Joaquín Castro (D-TX). Congressman Castro, who also sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, utilized the services of Jamal Moiz Awan. Speier and Carson’s offices utilized Imran Awan.

China’s central bank is running out of ways to stem capital flight and faces a near impossible task trying to manage the fall-out from extreme credit growth, two of Asia’s most influential banks have warned.

“Defense of the currency by the People’s Bank (PBOC) is no longer a viable option,” says Eric Robertson, the head of global macro strategy for Standard Chartered.

Standard Chartered has been in the China since the 1850s and has over 6,000 staff in the country. Its warnings should not be taken lightly.

The Asia-focused lender says powerful forces are driving capital out of the country and the picture is fundamentally more disturbing than it was during last year’s devaluation panic. This is putting the PBOC in an invidious position as it attempts to deal with festering troubles in the banking system.

While the PBOC still has $3 trillion of foreign exchange reserves, they are not as large as they look given the scale of the financial pressures and the structure of the Chinese economy. The ratio of the M2 money supply to reserves has collapsed to a 15-year low and this may prove to be the crucial ratio in a confidence crisis.

[Note by Jack Wheeler:  57 years ago in Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater proclaimed the conservative political dream:

“I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution.”

What you are about to read explains the legal mechanism already in place by which this can be easily done.  What Kim Strassel has written will blow you away with what is possible under a Trump Presidency guiding a GOP Congress.  Barry Goldwater was the original American conservative hero.  Somewhere, he is smiling right now.]

Last week (01/25), Todd Gaziano stepped into a meeting on Capitol Hill of free-market attorneys, think tankers and Republican congressional staff to unveil a big idea. By the time he stepped out, he had reset Washington’s regulatory battle lines.

Actually, more than reset.  This is a true game-changer.