151–160 of 166 posts
brexit. Everyone in the media try to ignore the elephant in the room. But, brexit. I know several companies who are winding down, because they can't export. Just too much trouble and money. It is everywhere, and nobody talks about it. brexit.
don't forget the 700 billion on lockdowns and the rona.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am disgusted every time I see a protest of pensioners or civil servants asking for even more money. It's practically buying votes. They truly are the privileged class.
Until you see what they are paid. I wouldn’t want to live on £500/month either.
Average is 1279€ as of 2021. Most of them won't have a rent/loan to pay or kids to feed and, hopefully, they will have some savings to complement this amount with.
brexit. Everyone in the media try to ignore the elephant in the room. But, brexit. I know several companies who are winding down, because they can't export. Just too much trouble and money. It is everywhere, and nobody talks about it. brexit.
Whatever the opposite of an elephant in the room is, that's Brexit. It was talked about to death . It was the cause and reason for everything. It was talked up by as either a glorious thing or a monumentally cataclysmic event when it hit in 2020 and in the end it was... mildly negative. It was skilfully played up as a wedge issue for 5 years. The elephant in this room isnt Brexit it is war. (and idiotic energy policy…
Confirmation bias is dangerous. As a continental European following UK media a lot Brexit is talked to "death" by some singular media personalities, it is not discussed at all in a broad sense.
It is fascinating for me to watch how a society decided collectively to "get on with it". And by that I mean: move forward pretending brexit did not happen and the present is not influenced by it. It feels like a sketch from monty python or fawlty towers where everybody pretends a clearly obvious thing does not exist.
I live in Germany and the war and energy politics have a much bigger impact here than in the UK. Sure not all of what you have going on there is attributable to Brexit and a lot of it has to do with the questionable quality of your political leadership — but pretending worse trading terms with the majority of your trading partners will somehow not inpact the economy of a nation takes a special kind of mental gymnastics.
The truth is that the UK was in a very priviledged spot within the EU before it left and it made good use of that position, both in a political and economic sense.
brexit. Everyone in the media try to ignore the elephant in the room. But, brexit. I know several companies who are winding down, because they can't export. Just too much trouble and money. It is everywhere, and nobody talks about it. brexit.
Actually, I can't stand articles drawing connections to Brexit everywhere, both continental and Brit, when they're clearly told-ya-so pieces coming from long held opinions.
And if we aknowledge that fucking up your trade relations like that has an impact, maybe discussing that fuckup is what people who want the good of their own country would do?
What is the plan here? Pretending Brexit is anything else than the exceptionally horrible british tabloid media manipulating gullible people into stupid decisions for political gain? Pretending that Brexit is anything else than an embarrassment on the international stage? How is that going to help?
I cannot shake the feeling that stubbornly pretending something embarrassing does not exist is extremely british in a certain sense. While this is great fun within the fictional bounds of a monty python sketch however, it prolongs the agony in such a large scale issue. Time to sober up and aknowledge reality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't follow, but history post 2016 wasn't written in gold if the UK had stayed in. The north of England, the central belt of Scotland and the south of Wales were in a terrible state. Brexit has failed to help, but remaining almost certainly wouldn't have either. The biggest issue the UK has experienced since leaving is Covid-19. Remaining wouldn't have helped us in that contingency. The UK has blamed Europe for…
>south of Wales were in a terrible state. South of Wales benefitted greatly from EU funds. From renovating coal tips to employment schemes. I don't understand your point here, it was the EUs fault that the UK had run down regions... even though the EU gave them money???? >The UK has blamed Europe for it's ills for 40 years. Remainers/rejoiners are still centered on this This makes no sense at all >we have to start to…
yes - in the same way that it's the EU's fault that Italy and Greece and Spain have run down regions. The Euro is sucking capital from the periphery of the EU to the core... and because the EU has monetary union but not federal union there are only very small fiscal transfers in the opposite direction. This is in contrast to the monetary union in the USA where there are considerable federal transfers.
>This makes no sense at all
I will try and better explain. I think that the UK must stop blaming it's ills on its position relative to the EU; instead it must take the arrangements of other European states as a fact and make its own policy and direction. The obsession with the EU will change nothing - only internal reform of the EU to a fully federal state will change the current dynamic. The only real path for the UK in the EU is to fully join a fully federal state - I wouldn't mind too much about that if the commission was abolished, a proper civil service developed and the EU parliament had the final say over the civil service and the president (I would like a president who could propose legislation and dissolve the parliament for elections if legislation could not be passed).
However, I see precisely 0 chance of this happening in the next 50 years. After that I will be dead...
> Are you suggesting that we shouldn't have international trade?
No, of course not. I am suggesting that we see reforms and changes to our economy that enable us to have balanced trade with the rest of the world. The arrangement where we import vastly more than we export is not sustainable (in so many ways). The Brexit devaluation should have been helpful, but has been rendered moot by the very bad post Brexit trading setup. The end of the current pathway (and the pre-Brexit path) is a comprehensive economic meltdown a-la Greece in 2011; there is still sometime to avoid this - but Trussonomics showed that there is not as much as our establishment would like to think. This is the UK's fault and the UK needs to fix it.
In a way the Truss debacle has been a good wake up call - but there's still time for it to be swept under the carpet...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only. Of course, you mean the EU. But the UK has run a trade deficit of $60bn with the EU for the last 10 years or so. Leaving hasn't helped that, but staying wouldn't have either. Something has to change in the relationship - something deep and real. The fundamental is the competitive advantage that the Euro confers on the German economy. Brexit is a way it can change overtime, there won't be an advantage for the…
I fail to see which advantage is conferred by the Euro to the German economy, at least in the relationship with UK. Unlike Germany, UK has always been free to establish any exchange rate they desired, between GBP and EUR. So only UK could have any advantages from the manipulation of the currencies. Within the countries that use EUR, it can be claimed that Germany has the advantage that the other countries cannot chea…
This was very convenient for Germany as they could build exports cheaply.
If you don’t understand this, which is a very basic part of how the eu ended up as what it is, I would just question the rest of your commenting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only. Of course, you mean the EU. But the UK has run a trade deficit of $60bn with the EU for the last 10 years or so. Leaving hasn't helped that, but staying wouldn't have either. Something has to change in the relationship - something deep and real. The fundamental is the competitive advantage that the Euro confers on the German economy. Brexit is a way it can change overtime, there won't be an advantage for the…
I fail to see which advantage is conferred by the Euro to the German economy, at least in the relationship with UK. Unlike Germany, UK has always been free to establish any exchange rate they desired, between GBP and EUR. So only UK could have any advantages from the manipulation of the currencies. Within the countries that use EUR, it can be claimed that Germany has the advantage that the other countries cannot chea…
If the Euro was part of a federal system with federal transfers - like the US$ then this advantage would be mitigated because the budget positions of the rich parts of the EU would be relatively weaker (due to transfers) and the periphery of the EU would have stronger fiscal positions.
>In my opinion that is a good thing, because stealing money from the people by devaluating their assets through artificial exchange rates is not the right solution for solving international commerce imbalances.
Fair opinion - but what is the solution? Do you agree that federalisation with fiscal transfer would be correct?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks lower than ever, https://www.statista.com/statistics/279898/unemployment-rate...
The recession hasn't hit yet...
This is a perfect example of why politics is now a tribal mud flinging fest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
don't forget the 700 billion on lockdowns and the rona.
The UK didn’t lockdown as much or spend as much as neighbors on COVID. In fact, they were famously late to locking down with Boris Johnson opting for a “let her rip” strategy until much later. And its continental neighbors are way more exposed to Russian gas than the UK is. And yet the UK is doing significantly worse than its European neighbors. It’s the only major European country whose economy has not recovered to…
No it isn't. This impression is created by the long stream of headlines posted here from the pro-EU part of the UK press (the pro-Brexit outlets tend to get systematically flagged), but it isn't actually true.
UK performance last quarter: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth-annua...
"The British economy expanded 2.4% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2022, the lowest reading since the contraction in Q1 2021, but slightly above market expectations of 2.1%, preliminary estimates showed. Household spending slowed sharply (0.8% vs 4.3% in Q2), business investment rose less (3.5% vs 5.2%) and government expenditure stalled. Meanwhile, exports jumped 18% and imports increased at a slower 7.2%"
Growth is normal-ish for this sort of west European economy, though below the USA, both imports and exports are up but exports are up more.
How about Germany, historically considered an economic power? https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-growth-annual
"The German economy expanded 1.3% year-on-year in Q3 2022, slightly better than a 1.2% rise in the preliminary estimate, and following a downwardly revised 1.6% growth in Q2. It is the smallest annual growth rate in three quarters"
Oh. Significantly lower growth than the UK.
Just a few days ago a very similar story was posted to HN about food price inflation, and once again all the top voted comments immediately blamed Brexit and claimed the UK is in unusually dire straits, even though inflation in the UK is no different to other similar countries in western Europe. Many posts made extremely strong factual claims about the supposedly terrible performance of the UK that were just made up and when this was pointed out people started retreating to positions like "there must be something worse and it'll definitely be because of Brexit". I spent some time on that thread pointing out false claims, like here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33682546
One of the comments in that thread asks, "Is the OBR's own analysis of Brexit evidence enough for you?". Their cited OBR report didn't contain any analysis - just an assumption that Brexit would reduce trade intensity by 15%. No working or sources were given for that number, it was just made up. This is typical for the topic. EU-related economics is just a large pile of confirmation bias.
Now take this story. It's paywalled so most people are going to be riffing on the headline. The headline is phrased as fact but it's actually just reporting on a prediction - economic modelling - once again from the OBR. This is presented as if it's unquestionable, but it's actually very questionable. The FT reports it because it's an extremely pro-EU biased outlet so it's telling their readers what they want to hear (the FT offices were literally flying the EU flag in the past, maybe still do).
Governments in general have a poor track record of economic prediction, and the UK civil service and OBR specifically have made unusually poor economic predictions for anything related to Brexit. It's not a neutral collection of dispassionate experts by any means. They keep being proven wrong by events, like when they said half million job losses would occur immediately after the referendum if Leave won, yet they don't engage in any kind of public post-mortem or learning processes. Nor, sadly, do too many HN commenters. If you're reading about the UK economy on HN at the moment then lots of the comments will be factually wrong. There are many people who are ideologically committed to EU rule, and that colors their perceptions of everything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whatever the opposite of an elephant in the room is, that's Brexit. It was talked about to death . It was the cause and reason for everything. It was talked up by as either a glorious thing or a monumentally cataclysmic event when it hit in 2020 and in the end it was... mildly negative. It was skilfully played up as a wedge issue for 5 years. The elephant in this room isnt Brexit it is war. (and idiotic energy policy…
> The elephant in this room isnt Brexit it is war. Confirmation bias is dangerous. As a continental European following UK media a lot Brexit is talked to "death" by some singular media personalities, it is not discussed at all in a broad sense. It is fascinating for me to watch how a society decided collectively to "get on with it". And by that I mean: move forward pretending brexit did not happen and the present is…
One may wonder how people got this so wrong?
"The truth is that the UK was in a very priviledged spot within the EU before it left and it made good use of that position, both in a political and economic sense"
Well, it's not really the case unfortunately. The UK was in a seriously under-privileged position inside the EU because its services based economy hardly benefited from the single market, which focused primarily on free movement of goods (benefiting Germany) and people (primarily benefiting eastern Europeans), but not on free provision of services (which would have benefited UK business). Instead services provisioning remained a patchwork of local regulations and barriers to entry.
As a consequence, leaving the EU single market didn't impact most British businesses to the extent predicted (by pro-EU economists, see my other comment), as they either weren't massive exporters to Europe to begin with, or were having to deal with local red tape and varying rules anyway.
There's a discussion of this problem here: https://euagenda.eu/upload/publications/untitled-46447-ea.pd...
This situation remained in place for decades because despite what the media may have claimed to people elsewhere in Europe the UK had essentially no influence, no ability to change anything and its "privileges" such as they were primarily consisted of opt outs of EU policies. But those opt outs were negotiated long ago, no more were in the offering and the ones that existed were under more or less permanent attack even when written into apparently watertight treaties. For example the EU was constantly attempting to force financial services out of London and the UK had to go to court, I think several times, to get these attempts blocked. Regulations were often interpreted in overtly political ways, again, specifically to damage the UK (see how "equivalence" rules aren't actually about equivalence, by universal agreement). It was often an antagonistic relationship despite being a member.
So the reason people don't talk about Brexit much in the UK is because the process was so drawn out and the eventual impact so minimal compared to COVID that there's really just not much to actually say.