As I have previously warned a vote for Brexit on June 23 would be a disaster for the UK economy. Now the Treasury has published a report outlining how bad the potential disaster will be. I would take the report very seriously and actually I am more pessimistic than the Treasury worst case scenario. I believe the expectational effects would be much worse due to the massive increase in uncertainty which I believe is worse than modelled by the Treasury. I think the report does a pretty good job overall in showing that the effects of a Brexit are multi-dimensional hitting GDP, economic growth, employment, wages, raising inflation, fiscal impact, raising interest rates, lowering investment and FDI. Anyhow below is a nice summary table showing two possible scenarios: Scenario 1 “a shock” and Scenario 2 “a severe shock”. I am confident that people will ultimately not be willingly vote themselves out of a job but there is no point in beating about the bush here. A vote for Brexit will have severe adverse short term and long term economic consequences. Trade deals take ages to negotiate (the Doha round has been ongoing for 15 years with no resolution) and the UK will find negotiating such deals extremely difficult.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email