Cont: Brexit: Now What? 9 Below Zero

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a_unique_person said:
Trump wants Mexico to pay for his wall and Boris wants the EU to pay for his bridge.
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With an estimated 1m tons of discarded bombs and chemical weapons in a deep sea trench on the route, plus an estimated £20b price tag (call it 40b to be realistic from the start). Fun!

Johnsonesque bilge. ffs
 
catsmate said:
You're confusion you opinions with reality. Again.


Yes.


Give it a try.


Sigh. The situation isn't just economic, it's political and social as well. The UK, in the sense of the Union, is already fragmenting. Support for, and belief in, the political situation is disappearing, quite justifiably given the lies and manipulation of the current regime and it's supporters.


Oh good grief... There's a Conspiracy Theory section you know.


And why is you opinion of me of any consequence? Merely because you're scared to face the unpalatable consequences of the current situation resorting to puerile attempts to denigrate others merely reflects on your own blindness to reality.
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SMH

Suffice it to say I'm willing to bet a huge sum of money that, on any timescale within, say, the next ten years, the UK will not have "collapsed" in any meaningful definition of the term - whether economically, politically or socially. And in my opinion*, the very fact that you've employed (and defended your employment) of such (in my opinion*) ridiculous hyperbole is very telling.


* I mean, I rather took it as understood that the things I write - unless of course I am stating things which I present as empirical facts - are my opinion. But since you clearly don't operate under those conventions, I guess I'll have to make things clear in this sort of manner in the future.....
 
GlennB said:
With an estimated 1m tons of discarded bombs and chemical weapons in a deep sea trench on the route, plus an estimated £20b price tag (call it 40b to be realistic from the start). Fun!
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Would you please explain this to this poor Yank who feels stoooopid when comments completely fly over his head? :(
 
LondonJohn said:
SMH

Suffice it to say I'm willing to bet a huge sum of money that, on any timescale within, say, the next ten years, the UK will not have "collapsed" in any meaningful definition of the term - whether economically, politically or socially. And in my opinion*, the very fact that you've employed (and defended your employment) of such (in my opinion*) ridiculous hyperbole is very telling.
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I agree that UK economic collapse is unlikely and talk of it is hyperbole.

If the UK GDP growth rate is 1% lower per year than it otherwise would then it would be roughly 10.5% behind where it would be after 10 years. If we also have Scoxit then the UK could be at risk of dropping out of the world's top 10 economies which has an effect on our bargaining position when it comes to trade deals.
 
The Don said:
Well what a shock :rolleyes:

I hope we all enjoy our chlorinated chicken, uninspected pork, complete lack of workers' and environmental protections in our post-Brexit brave new world. :(
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Hey at least with the Torry victory it is clear that the people are choosing a no deal exit this time.
 
Puppycow said:
Bad idea for an individual, usually. Although it may be counterintuitive, for a country that can literally print its own money and can borrow money for 10 years at an interest rate of, let's see, currently 0.77% (effectively negative in real terms compared to 2% inflation), it's actually a pretty good idea if the alternative is cutting needed government services.
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Keep in mind that deficits do dip into the pool of money available for capital investment. This can reduce capital investment available for private industry. If you attract foreign investment to make up the difference, this predisposes you to running a trade deficit.
 
lomiller said:
Keep in mind that deficits do dip into the pool of money available for capital investment. This can reduce capital investment available for private industry. If you attract foreign investment to make up the difference, this predisposes you to running a trade deficit.
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That has to be weighed against the revenue lost by not acting to mitigate the economic damage. Not doing the infrastructure project today means the contractors that would be hired are not, so they lay off staff. That former staff now pays no taxes and starts burdening social services. They also have no disposable income to spend at businesses, lather, rinse, repeat.
 
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ceptimus said:
Most likely outcome, in my opinion, is that there will be a lightweight trade deal with zero tariffs in place. Discussions about various matters will be ongoing into 2021 and beyond but the official (fudged) line from both sides will be that Brexit has been successfully completed.
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I can’t see that happening. The UK wants it’s own trade deals and regulations and still has no idea what it wants to do wrt the Irish border. These are a major complication for any trade deal.

You can’t do a trade deal at all without first coming to an agreement on customs, and that problem still looks intractable as BJ and most conservatives have repeatedly rejected to only viable possibility.

You don’t just need to agree on tariffs, you need to agree on a mechanism to enforce EU product standards. Eg, you can’t use chlorinated chicken in products intended for sale in the EU, and there needs to be a deal on a mechanism, to prevent it.

There can be no blanket “zero tariffs” unless all the subcomponents are either sourced from the EU or were purchased in accordance with EU rules and tariffs. An agreement on how to handle Differing tariffs on third party subcomponents will still need to be negotiated. Eg if you are importing parts for which the EU has tariffs but the UK does not, don’t expect to be able to export the finished product to the EU tariff free.

These points should apply equally for EU products exported to the UK, but I have no confidence BJ or his government understand the need. That should be a real red flag that it isn’t just the negative repercussions of Brexit the UK is facing. The people running Brexit seem to have no idea what it takes to for the UK to function independently of the EU.
 
LondonJohn said:
I think your analysis is entirely correct.

Some people seem to think that a) Brexit will signal some sort of abject collapse of the UK economy*, b) the trade deals that will (or will not) be implemented post-Brexit will necessarily greatly disadvantage the UK, c) there's effectively no way in which the Withdrawal Agreement can be sorted in any meaningful way by the end of 2020, and d) Johnson's agenda is in effect to deliberately kybosh the Withdrawal Agreement so that we leave with a de facto no-deal Brexit.
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The up front economic hit of a no-deal Brixit is already documented, and for the UK it exceeds the 2008 recession. The UK leadership doesn’t even seem to know what’s involved with getting a trade agreement in the first place. I see no hope of them successfully negotiating a deal of any kind, because they have no idea what’s involved when trading as independent nation outside of the EU.

This means among other things they will be unable to negotiate a trade deal, because they have next to no idea what types of things the EU could agree to and what types of things it’s next to impossible the EU ever agrees to. It also seems unlikely the current government understands what’s required for business to run integrated operations cross border. This tells me that most highly integrated businesses will ultimately cut the UK out of their supply chains until the people running the country get a handle on the concept of birders and customs.

There is also the matter of financial services being the UK’s most important industry, and financial servers are highly dependant on the government backing them. IMO A small country like an independent UK cannot adequately back a global financial services center like London. It seems inevitable that this sector will migrate to New York, Hong Kong and into an EU center like Brussels or Dublin leaving London as more of a regional/national center like Toronto or Sydney.

LondonJohn said:
But there seems to be an ongoing blindness to the fact that low-friction low-tariff (or tariff-free) reciprocating trade deals are exactly as much in the interests of the UK's key trade partners as they are of the UK itself.
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Not true. The important of trade varies with Relative to the size of their respective economies. Trade between the UAK and UE makes up a far larger % of the UK economy than it does the EU economy, so the economic impact of not having a deal is far greater from the UK than it is for the EU.

The other problem, as I detailed above, is that the people running Brexit seem to have no idea what’s required in a low friction trade deal. When you don’t understand what they can reasonably ask for there is no way to negotiate anything. Something radically different than the Theresa May deal is not possible and BJ seems no-deal is a better option then that. The predictable result, therefore is that the it will be a no deal Brexit.
 
LondonJohn said:
Firstly, this most recent global financial crisis reached its zenith in 2008 and 2009. Not 2010.
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Losses in employment, business activity and tax income occurred in 2008/09. This means that tax revenue hit it’s low point in 2010. If tax revenue was still dropping in 2010, by definition it could not have been the low point.

Budget deficits around the world were near their worst in 2010 for exactly this reason. Nonetheless it was a terrible point in time to try and pursue austerity as the recover was still slow and fragile. Austerity is something you do at the top of the cycle, not the bottom and certainly not in the midst of a fragile recovery.
 
SezMe said:
Would you please explain this to this poor Yank who feels stoooopid when comments completely fly over his head? :(
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While Mayor of London, amongst BoJo' numerous screw-ups as the London Garden Bridge (wiki) an idea he turned into one of his puerile vanity projects. It was to be a 370m pedestrian bridge across the Thames covered in trees and flowers. The expected cost kept increasing, to £310 million (the Millennium bridge cost one-fifteenth of that) until an investigation into the project in 2017revealed a morass of incompetence, lies and corruption

Recently BoJo has engaged in Trump-esque blathering about a bridge from Northern Ireland to Scotlnd. Which he wants the EU to fund, for some reason only known to him.

Between NI and Scotland lies the infamous Beaufort's Dyke (often referred to as the Beaufort Dyke) a seabed trench about 3.5km wide and up to 300m deep. In addition to being a significant problem with seabed engineering, e.g. pillars for a bridge, it was a popular sites for the UK to dump stuff. Like old buses, tens of thousands of tonnes of chemical weapons, about a million-and-a-quarter tonnes of unstable military ordnance (ever heard of metal picrates?) and some radioactive waste.
Occasionally stuff washes ashore and is caught by trawlers, including one from the Isle of Man that in '69 caught munitions filled with HS.

SezMe said:
Would you please explain this to this poor Yank who feels stoooopid when comments completely fly over his head? :(
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You're on your own, I have no idea what's he blatheirng about.


Hope this helps.
 
lomiller said:
Losses in employment, business activity and tax income occurred in 2008/09. This means that tax revenue hit it’s low point in 2010. If tax revenue was still dropping in 2010, by definition it could not have been the low point.



Budget deficits around the world were near their worst in 2010 for exactly this reason. Nonetheless it was a terrible point in time to try and pursue austerity as the recover was still slow and fragile. Austerity is something you do at the top of the cycle, not the bottom and certainly not in the midst of a fragile recovery.
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Spend during the bust to promote recovery, collect revenues during the boom to stabilize.

We basically get it wrong on both ends, now.
 
Delphic Oracle said:
Spend during the bust to promote recovery, collect revenues during the boom to stabilize.

We basically get it wrong on both ends, now.
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Pulling the trigger on some infrastructure projects while concreate and steal are cheep isn’t a bad idea. There will still also up being some spending increases due to things like additional EI payments when unemployment goes up. Otherwise, though I’m more of the mindset to keep government spending stable and predictable and leaving the stimulus to the central bank.
 
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