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.