The June 23 vote represents a huge popular rebellion against a future in which British people feel increasingly crowded within—and even crowded out of—their own country.
.. U.S. policymakers have long worried about the statism and anti-Americanism likely to prevail in an EU from which Britain is absent.
.. The force that turned Britain away from the European Union was the greatest mass migration since perhaps the Anglo-Saxon invasion. 630,000 foreign nationals settled in Britain in the single year 2015.
.. Is it possible that leaders and elites had it all wrong? If they’re to save the open global economy, maybe they need to protect their populations better against globalization’s most unwelcome consequences—of which mass migration is the very least welcome of them all?
.. If any one person drove the United Kingdom out of the European Union, it was Angela Merkel, and her impulsive solo decision in the summer of 2015 to throw open Germany—and then all Europe—to 1.1 million Middle Eastern and North African migrants
.. That U.S. citizens might have different interests—and that it is the interests of citizens that deserve the highest attention of officials elected by those citizens—went unsaid and apparently unconsidered.
Soros: Brexit’s effect on real economy comparable only to 2007-2008 crisis
Whether Mr. Soros took any positions to profit from a Brexit is unclear. A day after the referendum, he warned of the consequences of the Brexit vote.
“The consequences for the real economy will be comparable only to the financial crisis of 2007-2008,” he wrote in a post on the opinion website Project Syndicate.
Central Banks Worry About Engaging World Markets After ‘Brexit’
But, as the world’s leading central bankers finished a weekend of brainstorming in Basel, Switzerland, as to what their next move might be, some feared that this time around they might do more harm than good.
.. Global central bankers had already planned to convene at the annual meeting of the Bank for International Settlements, a clearinghouse and research shop that provides a private forum for central bankers to gather and exchange views.
But the British referendum results and the sharp fall in the markets that followed brought an extra urgency to the two-day meeting.
.. Playing a central role were exchange-traded funds, which at one point on Friday accounted for close to 50 percent of overall trading volume in stocks. That is an extraordinary statistic, given that the funds were largely unknown a decade ago as an investment option for investors.
The ability for investors to quickly and successfully buy and sell stocks and bonds, the crucial advantage that exchange-traded funds have over mutual funds, is seen by regulators as critical in times of acute financial stress.
.. Mr. Jen, the hedge fund manager, scoffed at the notion that the extraordinary central bank interventions of recent years were designed to stamp out deflationary threats and spark an increase in prices and economic activity in stagnant economies in Europe and Japan.
“We have plenty of inflation, it’s just asset price inflation,” he argued, referring to elevated equity, bond and housing markets that have been one consequence of these policies. “People can’t live in cities anymore, and they are grumpy about their jobs.”
.. Persistent central bank interventions have not only created dangerous distortions, they have added to a sense of worldwide cynicism that these measures have not accomplished their central aims: lifting economic growth and increasing wages.
How Brexit Will Change the World
17 top economists, foreign policy gurus and historians look five years into the future.
.. Some of them think the Brexit vote is a sign of the sun setting on Europe. “Brexit could be a wake-up call, or it could be 1933 all over again,” says Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, is more optimistic, saying that Brexit would set Europe “back on a path of high employment and healthy growth.”
.. Some of them think the Brexit vote is a sign of the sun setting on Europe. “Brexit could be a wake-up call, or it could be 1933 all over again,” says Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, is more optimistic, saying that Brexit would set Europe “back on a path of high employment and healthy growth.”
.. In Europe, countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and possibly the Netherlands, will be watching to see if the Brits can pull this off; if the damage seems manageable, pressures to take a similar path are likely to build in at least these countries.
.. Russia has been in recession for two years, in part because its biggest market, Europe, has been buying less of its biggest export, energy. Is it going to do better if that market slows further? Almost surely not. Same for China. Losers all around.
.. The vote fortifies him and his supporters in their deepest belief: that hyper-pluralist, overly rule-bound, post-sovereign policymaking is doomed, prone to interest-group capture and stalemate, and unlikely to sustain popular loyalty over the long term. For China, the lesson is roughly the same.
.. If you want to say that the losers from Brexit are the world’s pluralist political orders, you can make a pretty good case.
.. Scotland will probably secede from the UK, which will have major consequences for British defense policy, given the basing there of the nuclear deterrent. Advocates of Trident modernization may get a boost from the isolation that Britain will feel in departing the EU, but they will need to find other basing arrangements (perhaps co-locating on U.S. bases).
.. I expect limited impact outside of the United Kingdom in the next five months. The initial market hysteria will soon be completely reversed, outside of the United Kingdom, and there will likely be a strong rally following Trump’s defeat in November. Within Britain, there could be a substantial impact. It is quite possible that the real estate bubble in London will burst
.. the UK will no longer be viewed as a safe haven for the world’s rich.
.. In five years I expect that the EU will have turned away from austerity and will again be back on a path of high employment and healthy growth. The Brexit vote, along with the growth of populist parties across the continent, both left and right, will have finally convinced enough of the EU elites outside of Britain that they had to take a course other than austerity in order to save the EU.
.. The main difference is that the UK will have a much smaller financial sector, with more of its wealthy being generated from productive sectors of the economy. (Okay, this is some wishful thinking—but it’s not impossible.)
.. The main difference is that the UK will have a much smaller financial sector, with more of its wealthy being generated from productive sectors of the economy. (Okay, this is some wishful thinking—but it’s not impossible.)
.. we may see British young people working on the Continent being sent home because they no longer have a valid work permit
.. In five years’ time, the consequences will be less far-reaching than many are predicting today. Every corporation that does business in the UK and the EU will have an incentive to lobby Brussels to make the “divorce” as amicable as possible.
.. And thus, a major casualty of Brexit will be the U.S. rebalance of its foreign policy toward Asia, a policy that depends on a stronger Europe to take on more responsibility in its neighborhood.