6041

Well said. Most of the right-wing chudds would see right past your excellent commentary.

6042

Well, it seems to be based on open data which I’m willing to assume is accurate even if it isn’t direct from the source. But the reporting itself is kind of bullshit.

These aren’t “short positions on a no deal Brexit” or “short positions on the EU referendum result”. They’re just short positions on (the equity of) companies. All companies listed in the UK, whether they’re affected by Brexit or not. That’s what hedge funds do. They go long some things and short other things.

There’s no attempt in the analysis to see what these funds are actually shorting, whether they’d be disproportionately affected by Brexit (which would potentially indicate hypocrisy, I suppose), or whether they’re just companies that everyone knows are struggling. Do the connected funds short more or differently than the unconnected funds? The article doesn’t care. It doesn’t even tell you what proportion of the total outstanding shorts (GBP 13.4bn, using their data source) the connected funds make up, and how that compares to the connected funds’ AUM as a proportion of all funds, which is about the bare minimum analysis one would want to do for a story like this.

More fundamentally, the thesis doesn’t seem to make much sense. For there to be something nefarious here, you’d want a fact pattern something like this: funds short Brexit-exposed companies, then fund Boris’s campaign in hopes of profit as hard Brexit becomes more likely. But their own chart shows the vast majority of the shorts being put on over a month after Johnson launched his campaign, ie after you’d expect most fundraising to have happened and when it was already absolutely clear he was going to win pursuing a hard Brexit policy (and, importantly, after a whole raft of negative economic data had been published). It’s just not consistent with any logical scheme.

And looking at the actual most shorted companies and who’s shorting them, it seems pretty standard.

Odey, for instance, has big short positions in among other firms Debenhams (a deeply troubled department store which just went through a creditors voluntary arrangement and closed a bunch of stores) and Metro Bank (a so-called challenger bank which relatively recently disclosed it had messed up its capital requirement calculations and had to raise new capital), and Intu Properties, which owns a bunch of crappy shopping centres that are really struggling because of the likes of Debenhams. On the face of it, none of Odey’s biggest shorts are obvious Brexit bets.

Odey’s biggest positions (as a proportion of outstanding stock)

Debenhams 7.87 7.87

Lancashire 5.21 5.19

Metro Bank 3.10 3.27

Intu Properties 3.09 2.97

IQE 1.31 1.90

Lookers 1.32 1.32

Jupiter Fund Management 1.22 1.19

AA 0.99 0.99

Royal Mail 0.91 0.91

Ashmore Group 0.89

Indeed, the only one of the top 10 most shorted overall companies that seems to be disproportionately impacted by Brexit is Thomas Cook, a high street travel agent. But, again, that’s been in trouble for a long time and is going through a debt restructuring.

6043

They own Milton Keynes shopping centre, which seems to be doing OK.

6044

They own the small one, not the Centre:MK next door.

Ironically, though, I was in there just the other day and it looks like the weakest retailers are all in the Centre (House of Fraser, Monsoon, Thomas Cook etc). On the other hand, it has many many more, stronger stores to balance it out.

6045

Oh!

Anyway, that yellowhammer document isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

I wonder what was redacted in point 15.

Edit: so the tldr of that document is that the UK is not ready, except for water and electricity.

6046

The journalist who it was originally leaked to reckons it was about the petrol refineries.

6047

But point 14 discusses petrol, a little bit anyway, in areas localised to traffic delays near the ports so not in general.

Good point though, most of the petrol comes from abroad. Vulnerable supply line, and if that goes wrong :o

I can imagine the chaos if petrol is restricted.

I remember the fuel protests back in 2002 (? 2003?) and no one was panicking then, and the economy was bouyant, and the petrol was there, just the transport industry was protesting rising prices iirc.

Against a backdrop of rising food prices etc, I don’t see restricted fuel going over at all well.

6048
6049

That was actually my thought, remembering it was prepared on a worst case basis. Also mentioned no overall food shortages.

However it is still a far from desirable situation to put it mildly and as noted in the document and by many others here & elsewhere, the poor and otherwise vulnerable will suffer the most…as usual.

6050

It’s now labelled “reasonable worst case”. It was supposedly “base case” when it was leaked.

6051

Yeah, they’ve just rebranded it as worst case. This is the stuff they actually expect to happen at minimum. It could get a lot worse.

6052

Even the less obvious industries are fucked.

The lunatics in those comments. They even sound like Trumps MAGA mob.

Yellowhammer is just whats going to happen and its only what they (who face it, aren’t the finest project planners because they all fled the civil service 3 years ago) knew to cover. There will be dozens of sectors/industries and keystones/fail points that are completely off their half broken radar.

Even that thing about the refineries doesnt really actualise every company impacted by it. There are chains of complexity running off everything. And the increased imports are just a line in a paragraph, no explanation of the national infastructure that will be need to be constructed (2 years ago) to handle it it nor cost with a GBP that’s pretty much toilet paper.

Everything is going to be fucked and Im going to have crowds of angry white ****s blaming me and my families religion for it, I fucking know it.

6053

I’m concerned by how all these little problems interact. It’s very hard to know. It might be fine, but there’s plenty of scope for serious problems unfolding too.

Hopefully we never have to find out.

6054
6055

I predict the answers to his questions will be:

1 - FREEEEEEEDOMMMMMMMM !!!

2 - REMOANERS !

edit: and the counter question:

Where is your fighting, DUNKIRK, spirit?

6056

More like: “Once again, Project Fear has gripped this poor parent, who only knows to use rational discourse to assume her projections, petty facts and dry reason conjured by the know-it-all experts, and not wield the unbridled heedless optimism of our visionary idealists, that is to be the driving force in our success. If you don’t believe your child will live, and give in to worry, then he is already dead, and Brexit will not have changed that. The little bugger has cancer, after all.”

6057

The Brexiters will attack the parent of the child. This is how they work. People might have thought my posts were hyperbole over the last few years, but no, these people are really this terrible.

They are willing, gladfully and knowledgeably willing to kill children in order to be allowed to stop immigrants living in the same town as them.

6058

Well, half the USA was willing to fight a war that killed 600,000 or so in order to not have to live with the blacks they had been enslaving for two hundred years.

Of course, in our case, the rest of the country it turned out wasn’t willing to have a multiracial society either, at least not for another hundred years after the war…

6059

Comparisons between Brexiteers and the US civil war aside, I think I am getting quite tired of the rhetoric… Not just in this thread, but pretty much everywhere I go there’s some article or other about how Brexit is being sabotaged by those damned remoaner traitors or how the Brexiteers are purposely looking to murder the poor and non whites etc.

For me personally the worst of it is that it seems several of my friends (and a brother of mine, whose messages I must endure even though I blocked him, because there is a family group WhatsApp where he posts his Brexiteer poison, spouting off the same tired slogans and bitching about remoaners and the WILL of the people. He even said today yellowhammer was written by remoaners…) have subscribed to team brexit, and having chosen a side are wedded to that side and see things through the prism of fighting for their side.

Debate and reasoning have always been in short supply amongst the general population (because those things require contemplation and rational thinking, which are HARD at the best of times, so why bother when you are working full time and you just read the Sun - or the BBC, etc - unthinkingly?) but now it seems to have become an active disdain for opposing viewpoints.

I have found myself exhibiting similar behaviour, infact that is one of the key reasons I ditched Facebook. The remain echo chamber was getting crazy. I have no idea what the leaver chamber is like, never bothered with it.

So, based on a recommendation from elsewhere, I have decided to limit my news gathering to the boring, seemingly objective and not at all sensationalist general news section of Wikipedia.

I have also decided you’ll be hearing (reading) much less from me in the subject here.

Instead I shall keep myself to myself, as much as I am able, and simply hope there is a revocation of Article 50, followed by a no stress discussion as a nation about the desire for brexit and the possibilities, without sabre rattling, partisanship, blame gaming, bitching, threats and insults.

Then, once a consensus is reached, if that consensus is still to leave, then we leave, but we leave as a country with a plan and a country united.

If, however, the consensus based on the known facts, which currently strongly indicate that there aren’t any economic benefits for brexit(at least a no deal brexit) and that there is CONSIDERABLE pain involved, shows that people don’t want a brexit if it means lack of food, lack of petrol etc, and if we (the government, the EU etc) can demonstrate a framework to resolve certain issues (I’m thinking specifically of the apparent imbalance in the fisheries and agriculture sector,) then that too should be respected.

I say that because I still believe that most if not all of what the leavers promised in 2016 was a load of shit, and that any legitimate issues regarding sovereignty etc are issues that are self inflicted and thus the solution is down to us.

Peace out, BBB

6060

I don’t blame you. The partisanship only seems to be rising in intensity. Despite our differing views I’ve very much enjoyed your input on the subject. See you on the other side :)