Unlike Timex I did 5 minutes of googling.
People who can admit the experts got it wrong:
The Bank of England
The Office of Budget Responsibility
The Financial Times
Standard and Poors
People who can’t admit the experts got it wrong:
Timex
arrendek
Oh dear:
“His comment came as David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, confirmed that the Government still pledges to get net migration down to below 100,000, saying that once immigration is “under your control anything is possible”.”
Presumably because if you can control immigration you can also perform other miracles like parting the seas and turning water into wine. headdesk
Oh but apparently thinks that actually doing it is the “home secretary’s problem”. I’m sure he’s popular in the home office right now.
Yay, I matter!
Saying “the experts got it wrong” is kind of meaningless though. What specific predictions were wrong?
Pre-Brexit, there were widespread predictions of a GDP collapse and collapse in business confidence and inwards investment in the 2nd half of 2016 if the referendum voted for Brexit. I recall these predictions, and can find ft and economist articles accepting there were “predictions of doom”.
GDP growth is highest in the G7, and business confidence is up.
Is the fall in the pound something to do with that? Yes. Is inflation up? Yes.
However based on this I reduced the weight I gave to those opinions and have upgraded my prediction for actual brexit from “economic calamity” to “It’s going to be pretty bad”.
However, ultimately I don’t see a problem with trumpeting the highest GDP growth figure in the G7 as “world leading”. At the end of the day it’s not terribly meaningful a comparison, but it’s certainly no less meaningful than taking a currency swing and representing it as a change in the size of the economy.
The GDP growth rate you are citing… is it GDP, or inflation adjusted Real GDP?
It’s just the raw GDP growth rate, right?
Nope, real figures. It’s a mix of the pound fall, fiscal+monetary loosening, and the rest of the G7 not having a great year for various reasons. As i said it’s not super meaningful.
This is the first link that pops up. It doesn’t explicitly state real figures, but can we take it on trust that the IMF and the Guardian are using real figures? (If they aren’t the US is in recession and I’m sure I would have heard about that)
That seems kind of amazing that it could have grown enough to overtake the massive loss of purchasing power due to the currency collapsing, but I guess they must be working with real GDP.
The actual IMF report is here:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2017/update/01/index.htm
And looking at this, it suggests that they are predicting significantly slower growth this coming year, at only 1%. I had thought that this was generally what many were predicting, given that the Brexit thing hasn’t even actually happened yet.
All that being said anyone who had predicted an immediate collapse of the UK economy immediately after the vote, was indeed incorrect.
Brexit hasn’t started yet. That’s all I can say.
The banks have started moving though. (Some are in the news, I know of many more though as I’m a regulatory professional)
The rest of the financial services industry will follow bar asset management and money laundering.
And then we’ve lost 50% of our GDP permanently.
I just hope the Quitlers will be queuing at soup kitchens in 5 years. I want them to fucking suffer.
A lot of folks who weren’t quitters are going to suffer as well. That’s the problem with wishing misery- it’s going to cause pain to those who don’t deserve it.
The Quitlers can eat the same shit sandwich we’re all forced to eat, I’ll just enjoy the schaudenfraude more in respect to them, especially as we’re planning for it and they are still in denial or just outright attacking those pointing out the realities of Brexit.
It’s like one of those cautionary tales where a famine is due and those carefully husbanding resources are being mocked by those who feast every day.
I don’t think there will be much schaudenfraude to be found. One, I hope Brexit isn’t bad enough for that, more a loss that isn’t truly felt, being poorer but not so much you actually try to realize why it’s happening.
Or, the other option, it is real bad. In which case you’ll get a hardening of opinion both in Britain and the EU, with the EU as the reason for bad times in Britain and vice-versa in the EU. Because if it is real bad, EU as the cause in Britain is assured, and you can be sure that in those countries that might be feeling it in the EU “Those fucking English” will become a popular phrase…
The UK Supreme Court has ruled that Brexit will require an actual act of Parliament.
Not unexpected, but a good result, constitutionally. Equally significant, the Supreme Court held that the devolved governments (Northern Ireland in particular) can’t block withdrawal.
So Parliament won’t vote for Brexit, will they? Or is this just a formality.
Short of a bunch of politicians deciding they really didn’t want that job anyway, formality.
It would be gutsy to go against the will of the people after a referendum, no? Has that ever happened in the UK.
In Australia, a referendum is binding, otherwise they term it a plebiscite.
Yes, it’s a formality, especially given Corbyn’s pathetic stance, though I will be informing my MP I expect him to represent my and the majority of his other constituents on this or he won’t be getting my vote next election.
This was a non-binding referendum. Referenda in the UK don’t have any inherent power, beyond the legislation used to create the specific referendum, which can make it effectively binding or not. But even that legislation could be repealed in a subsequent vote. Parliament is sovereign.
The 48/52 was never a particularly persuasive majority to me and I wonder how many people have changed their minds since the vote. My MP, Dennis Skinner, wanted to leave which no doubt emboldened the already fervent leavers around here. Still, I’m curious whether positions have thawed.