Brexit: the cost for Britain would be beyond comprehension

RH commercial vehicles is a British firm whose business is inextricably bound with Europe as its a dealer for Swedish owned Renault Trucks.

So it is perhaps surprising that its boss wants Britain to leave the EU.
But he believes his business will be free of restrictive red tape if Britain goes it alone.

“The positives for us are that we will no longer be overburdened with regulation. I don’t believe it will make any significant change to us at all in terms of trade,” says Nigel Baxter, managing director of RH Commercial Vehicles.

“Our relationship is with the European manufacturer, that relationship will continue. We’re continuing to grow, continuing to develop, they are continuing to grow and continuing to develop. There’s a vested interest for both parties to ensure that that continues and I have every confidence that it will.”

Providing EU leaders and then the European Parliament agree a deal to keep Britain in the bloc, Cameron will still have to convince many in his own party, and beyond, to back his measures.

With a referendum on whether to leave the EU planned for later in the year, members of Parliament from across the political spectrum are gearing up for battle.

“The advantage of coming back is that we can take control of our spending to make sure we spend our money on our priorities,” said Steven Baker MP and founder of Conservatives for Britain.

Not so says Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP and chairman of Labour Business:
“It would be very bad from the point of view of investment because many many global companies invest in the UK because it’s an English speaking market but also because it’s a member of the European Union and so it gives you access to a much larger market of 500 million consumers

According to think tank “Open Europe”:, the UK could lose up to three percent of its GDP if it pulls out of Europe as a result of increased import and export costs.

That figure could be eased in case of a comprehensive trade deal with the EU (-0,8% GDP) or in case of trade deal and deregulation (-0,1% GDP)But, at the same time, the benefits of withdrawing may boost Britain’s coffers by opening up to global trade (0.6% GDP) and if there’s a push towards unprecedented deregulation (1.55% GDP).

As politicians wrangle over the benefits of being in or out, many business owners are convinced they will pay the price if there’s a “Brexit”.

Tom Gosnells, founder of Gosnells London Mead, believes his trade will suffer adversely: “Our kegs come from the Netherlands, our bottles come from Belgium and our honey comes from Spain, so pretty much all our supply chain is related to Europe. Also, We already export to Italy and we’re looking to other markets within Europe and I think if we came out of the EU there would be some risk around that.”

While the consequences for business and politics remain unknown, the British public according to polls are evenly split.

Read more: Brexit: the cost for Britain | euronews, world news

The Dark Force: The Financial Elite Who Gave Us 2008 Had No Eye to See and No Ear to Hear

We have seen the enemy and he is us; the enemy(us) being zero interest rates and unlimited easy money round the globe that could become a worse bubble than the 2008 credit bubble. The only thing we have to fear is QE that lasts forever.

In the spring of 2008 the IMF predicted that the economy of the developed nations would grow by 3.8% in 2009. Instead, due to the global financial crisis and the Great Recession, the economies of the U.S., Europe, Japan declined by 3.9%. That is a major mistake of prognostication. This preposterously optimistic forecast by the central bankers and establishment economists was shockingly wrong by a margin of almost 8%, indicating economists were totally unaware of the perfect storm of financial crisis descending on them.

These are the reputed establishment types who dominate enclaves like the IMF, as well as the Federal Reserve who are supposed to be measuring reality. The whole absurd farce reminds international economist William White (recommended to me by the soon-to-be Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Stanley Fischer) of the comic strip Pogo. Pogo’s mantra was “We have seen the enemy and he is us!”

The “enemy” were the brains of the global economic system and they were duping themselves and each other, White suggests. They were so far inside the system they did not see the crisis that was on top of them. It takes an “outsider” to see that, White believes. As to the Bank of International Settlements, the BIS, where White once was a top economist, “we put out both public warnings as to the dangers as well as in our private reports to clients,” White tells me. ” But, the warnings were ignored.”

The problem is cultural and the result of the denial of the elite, according to White; a tale of seduction amongst the creators of 2008: “ borrowers, lenders, regulators, central banks, academics and politicians, [who] were each seduced into believing different things that were not true.” The relationship between these various parties also contributed to them having “no eye to see and no ear to hear,” White told a distinguished audience on October 24 in London, at a presentation entitled What Has Gone Wrong With the Global Economy? Why Were Warnings Ignored? What Have We Learned From the Experience?

I mean to tell you what lessons White has learned, and even though he is not a regular on CNN or columnist for the FT, Stanley Fischer (you’ll be hearing a great deal more about Fischer, once he becomes Vice Chairman of the Fed) assured me that White saw 2008 coming as early as 2003 in a paper White, then at the BIS, gave at the Jackson Hole, Wyoming conclave of central bankers. He had the vision and the intelligence to see the disaster coming. And he is predicting odds on another problem sooner or later.

So, what disaster did White warn me and you about that could be coming down the road? “Expansionary monetary policy…has its shortcoming… such policies have undesirable unintended consequences,” White explained in London. By undesirable, he means a much larger ‘too big to fail’ problem than we had before.

He means the creation of “zombie companies and zombie banks” that “have contributed to more risk taking and unjustified increases in asset prices.” To sum up, the crisis is not over.

White fears another catastrophe from the knee-jerk, ever more aggressive, overly long-lasting easy money policies espoused by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, to be inherited by Janet Yellen and Fischer once they are in place.

Here’s the gist of his warning. In the financial market crises of the past many decades — 1987, 2000, 2008 — the solution has always been the same, increase money supply and maintain rock-bottom low interest rates, says the former BIS economist and Canadian central banker. He is plainly worried about the outcome of a policy that just keeps printing more money aggressively with increasingly less positive results on economic growth than before.
White strongly questions his friend Ben Bernanke’s devotion to Quantitative Easing. What if the roots of fragility and accidents are just waiting to happen from being wrong about repeating over and over again the same excessive easy money policy? What if the Greenspan Put and the easy money that resolved crises in 1987, 1991, 1994, 2000, and 2008 are only a prologue for an even worse crisis that additional QE won’t solve?

White’s most intense fearsome nightmare is that the boom and rising bubble of home prices in Canada, Poland, Israel, Germany, Australia and New Zealand will eventually burst just as they did in the U.S. in 2007-2008, triggering another worldwide recession that the elite finance opinion makers will meet with an even more aggressive easing of money and lowering of the cost of money.

“Why do people believe what they believe?” White asks me on our hour-long transatlantic phone call. “People with influence over the system want us to believe that the system they prefer–more and cheaper money–is the best of all solutions for every crisis.”

What’s gone wrong is that ultra easy money policy is seen as a risk-free solution, even though the forecasting records based on easy money create forecasting records that are just too damned optimistic. “What if Bernanke’s faith in QE is the root of fragility and accidents waiting to happen?” White asks me. He has come to understand that there has grown an unstated alliance between economists and powerful interests, who have seduced each other into an unannounced alliance over a policy that benefits them in the short run, but may create more severe crises and disasters down the road.

In his October 24 London talk, White put it another way: “The Great Moderation, as Hyman Minsky would have predicted, generated the belief that the world had become a permanently less risky place.” The result of this mutual seduction was the manipulation of LIBOR, the reckless selling of toxic assets to unsuspecting buyers, and the hiding of highly leveraged risky activities in the off-the balance sheet shadow banking system.
As Pogo said: “We have the seen the enemy and he is us.”

The Financial Elite Who Gave Us 2008 Had No Eye to See and No Ear to Hear - Forbes