Thread: Brexit - It's Still On!

Can't argue with any of that. Facts can't be ignored, it was and is an unmitigated disaster which should have been avoided. But then, better for the other EU states who had had enough of the special treatment the UK always demanded - fuck 'em.

All lost now and because of a bunch of right wing bigoted Tory/UKIP demagogues and their hedge fund shills combining with Russian hackers manipulating 15 million deluded and credulous English fuckwits.

nothing more than blinkered extremist trolling. hateful twitter cut and paste nonsense




fact is, the covid/putin/years of cheap loans bill needs to be paid, and surprise surprise, nobody wants to pay it!

as i have said many times, the eu will not exist in its present state in 15 years time. putins machinations, the german penchant for cocksucking and the french love of arselicking will see to that


Europe’s next debt crisis is only just beginning – tearing North and South apart.

AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD
1 November 2022 • 2:00pm
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard


The eurozone credit crunch has begun in earnest. Lending conditions across the currency bloc are the tightest since late 2012, when the region was still crippled by the sovereign debt crisis.

The European Central Bank’s lending survey (BLS) is a leading indicator of what is to come. Both the supply and demand for credit definitively buckled in the third quarter, even if the eurozone economy eked out a last gasp of legacy growth. Lending is deteriorating most rapidly in Italy and Spain.

“The tightening in financing conditions corroborates our view that the euro area is headed towards a sharp recession,” said Ludovio Sapio from Barclays. Trouble is baked into the pie already, whatever happens to Vladimir Putin’s war and global gas prices.

Banks are doing what they always do at the rumble of thunder: they are imposing tougher terms on households and small firms; they are rejecting loan applications. This is a self-fulfilling process that can spin out of control at turning points in the business cycle.

Ignazio Visco, governor of the Bank of Italy, warned this week of a “serious credit crunch” if the ECB tightens too hard into the downturn.



Businesses are battening down the hatches, limiting borrowing to what is strictly necessary to stay afloat. Homeowners are baulking at soaring mortgage costs. The ECB said the number of banks braced for a fall in demand for housing loans is the greatest since the depths of the global financial crisis in late 2008.

The loan survey was carried out before the ECB raised rates by 75 basis points last week. It was also before the ECB took steps to slim down its €2.1 trillion programme of cheap loans (TLTROs) to eurozone banks, which has flattered the profits of Italian and Spanish lenders by subsidising them with a fat spread on the arbitrage trade.

These banks will lose a key prop just as they face the hit from the global bond market crash. They were induced to accumulate government debt under quantitative easing (QE). Those banks most invested in this sovereign bank doom-loop now carry large paper losses that must be “marked to market”. This erodes their capital ratios, forcing them to curtail lending.


The ECB faces an excruciating dilemma. Eurozone inflation jumped to 10.7pc in October and has yet to peak. The stagflation misery mix is no worse than in the UK – and no better either – but the political implications are profoundly different within the structure of the euro.

German inflation has reached 11.4pc on the Eurostat measure, the highest since the Korean War in 1951. It is significantly higher than the brief 8pc peak during the energy crisis of the 1970s when the Bundesbank – almost alone among the Western central banks – opted early for recession to break the back of inflation.

The founding contract of the euro was that the ECB should be as rigorous as the Bundesbank, and the euro should be as hard as the D-Mark. That contract looks like a quaint relic today. But it would be tempting fate to assume that Germany will tolerate double-digit inflation for long, or that it will allow the ECB to keep tilting policy towards the needs of Club Med debtors in the cause of euro solidarity.

The German economic establishment thinks the country is on the cusp of a wage-price spiral. Workers from 12 big industrial companies went on strike over the weekend as a warning shot. The trade union giant IG Metall is demanding an 8pc pay raise and is threatening a very un-German winter of discontent. Public sector workers recently asked for 10.5pc.

There is an even deeper problem of social cohesion. Inflation is toxic in Germany because of deep-rooted cultural traditions. Half of Germans rent rather than own property. They typically keep their savings in bank accounts, and have no financial assets. They have entirely missed out on the compensating wealth gains of the last decade. Gefühlte Inflation – the inflation that shoppers feel – is running at twice the official CPI rate.

A study by the German Economic Research Institute found that the real disposable income of the poorest decile dropped 8pc from 1995 to the onset of the pandemic in 2020. The second decile had seen no rise in a quarter century. These figures will be much worse after Covid and Putin’s commodity squeeze.

Volker Wieland, a former member of the German Council of Economic Experts, said inflation had reached the point where nothing short of sharply positive real rates will be enough to break the fever. “Inflation is going to become entrenched unless the central bank acts,” he said.

Positive real rates are precisely what Italy cannot endure. It is why premier Giorgia Meloni lashed out at the ECB on her first day in office, denouncing rate rises on the cusp of recession as precipitous.

She said ill-timed monetary tightening would choke credit to families and firms, and she complained that halting bond purchases creates “extra difficulties for member states with high public debt” – as indeed it has.

The borrowing cost on Italian 10-year bonds has risen by 135 basis points to 4.28pc since August. The risk spread over German Bunds has widened to 217 basis points. It is as if the weakest member of the team must carry a double pack up the mountain.

Mrs Meloni is now in implicit alliance with France’s Emmanuel Macron, who has also castigated unnamed monetary hawks at the ECB. His demarche is logical: France has an even bigger debt burden than Italy.

Data from the Bank for International Settlements shows that total public and private debt (non-financial) is 351pc of GDP in France, up 70 percentage points over the last decade. The comparable figure is 276pc in Italy, and 271pc in the UK, and 199pc in Germany.


It is not that Germany is right, or that Italy and France are right. They are all right. This conflict is what happens if you impose a single coin and a single interest rate on a disparate region that fails every key test of Robert Mundell’s optimal currency area (OCA), (before Mundell drank the Kool Aid).

Zero rates, QE, and targeted longer-term refinancing options during the deflationary era masked the fundamental clash of interests over eurozone destiny. Double-digit inflation has shattered the truce.

German-led hawks on the ECB’s governing council are demanding the start of quantitative tightening (QT) by January: the German government is digging in its heels over joint financing for the energy bailout, and it wants to reimpose strict limits on fiscal deficits under the Stability Pact.

This battle will determine whether or not the eurozone crosses the line into a full debt union, either via camouflaged ECB funding or via a fiscal merger that eviscerates the budgetary sovereignty of national parliaments. Inflation and the violent repricing of global yields make it impossible to fudge the matter for much longer.

Thomas Mayer, Deutsche Bank’s ex-chief economist and author of Europe’s Unfinished Currency, said the ECB has already gone beyond the point of no return. It has become a fiscal captive, much as the Bank of Italy was captive of the Italian treasury under the lira. “We have see the ‘liraisation’ of the euro,” he said.

He predicts that the EMU experiment will end in much the same way as the Latin Monetary Union in the 19th century. Switzerland eventually pulled out because it lost patience with chronic debasement. The eurozone is a sturdier beast but the pressures are the same. “It can’t survive,” he said.

The bond shock of 2022 has been a stress test for the whole world. The UK put its head above the parapet with the mini-Budget. It corrected that mistake with impressive speed and efficiency. The last few weeks have been a vindication of the British institutional system, not a display of weakness.

The stress test for the eurozone is just as serious, if not worse. What is different is that the North-South divide within monetary union more or less guarantees that there will be no quick and clean resolution.

There will instead be intractable disputes between creditors and debtors, and between those who detest inflation and those think it the lesser evil. A long-festering crisis will drag on until something breaks.

the uk has its own financial problems to deal with, and we are better equipped to deal with them on our own and not hampered by eu one size fits all regs. you silly eu dinosaurs are on the verge of extinction.

and the uk is happy to leave the bickering euros to their own fate. our pain will be shorter, and much easier to cure than yours.


cue ... s.a. telling us all that ambrose evans pritchard is just a dumb tory shill.

The vacillating Bank of England governor, the over-promoted Andrew Bailey, has raised interest rates but in prognosticating the dubious belief inflation increases will stop next year he is in fact banking on the inherent weakness of a British economy doing the work for him. the markets are unimpressed and the £ has fallen again.

The thing is, the economy was not sabotaged by COVID or the Ukrainian war as stupid Brexiteers might have you believe but has been fucked by a combination of Brexit and Trussonomics - the former has throttled commerce by a million SMEs now denied an unfettered market in Europe, restricted the labour supply by up to a million workers killing the services industry and reduced inward investment while simultaneously forcing corporate players to take flight, and the latter which destroyed the £ by reducing its already Brexit devalued rate by a further 15%.

In the end, the current iteration of a Brexitory government will yet again fail to acknowledge the inescapable fact, the person of colour in the economic woodpile so to speak, Brexit has fucked the UK systemically and its failure is now used as an unconvincing economic measure by a febrile BoE governor to salve the depredations of international markets not so deluded.

What a bloody mess. The UK economy is emerging world status and £ is back to $1.12 and 42 baht.

s.a.

The vacillating Bank of England governor, the over-promoted Andrew Bailey, has raised interest rates but in prognosticating the dubious belief inflation increases will stop next year he is in fact banking on the inherent weakness of a British economy doing the work for him. the markets are unimpressed and the £ has fallen again.

The thing is, the economy was not sabotaged by COVID or the Ukrainian war as stupid Brexiteers might have you believe but has been fucked by a combination of Brexit and Trussonomics - the former has throttled commerce by a million SMEs now denied an unfettered market in Europe, restricted the labour supply by up to a million workers killing the services industry and reduced inward investment while simultaneously forcing corporate players to take flight, and the latter which destroyed the £ by reducing its already Brexit devalued rate by a further 15%.

In the end, the current iteration of a Brexitory government will yet again fail to acknowledge the inescapable fact, the person of colour in the economic woodpile so to speak, Brexit has fucked the UK systemically and its failure is now used as an unconvincing economic measure by a febrile BoE governor to salve the depredations of international markets not so deluded.

What a bloody mess. The UK economy is emerging world status and £ is back to $1.12 and 42 baht.

utter bullshit. thinktank nonsense and a pathological obsession with the brexit that interfered with your plans.

have you been asleep for the past three years .

the uk has a covid bill to pay you dolt. as does every fucking country that had a lockdown, printing money that they gave to people for sitting at home for two years. every country that has "enjoyed" zero interest rates discouraging saving and encouraging reckless borrowing and money printing that has led to rampant inflation.... all compounded by russias invasion of ukraine and the resulting shortages of food and energy

the uk is taking the first steps to ensure that the covid bill will be paid. money borrowed must be paid back. people were begging sunak to support them as they sat at home during the lockdowns, happy to be away from the workplace, happy to have the freedom to "work" from home. now the bill has to be paid and a period of austerity will ensue. the era of free money is thankfully over, and the era of reality is thankfully here. savers will at last reap some rewards, and the profligate, the irresponsible and the lazy will suffer. serves them right, they will have to learn to tighten their belts. only a fool could fail to see this coming and not take steps to prepare. but no, easy money is here, lets have a new car, an expensive holiday, a new house.

the present misery that the british imagine they are feeling has very little to do with government incompetence, but more to do with the medias
incessant promotion of the "what are the government going to do to help me" line of whinging that infects everyone with the virus of entitlement and victimhood.

the wealthy are insulated from these problems, the middle class who always take their situation for granted have only themselves to blame for their lack of economic naus and their love of showing off range rovers, audis and luxury goods, and the poor thanks to their stupidity and inability to think for themselves after years of suckling on the government teats of benefits, victimhood and entitlement egged on of course by the socialist media will be the ones to suffer most. as has always been the case and always will be. only lottery wins or crime can release the shackles that have always entrapped the unfortunate dumb poor.

life is sometimes shit. so suck it up or die. but blaming someone else and marinating in the resulting anger will just compound the situation.

the financially crippling effects of overregulation, a lot of it imposed by the eu, is a killer for small business in the uk.

necessity is the mother of invention. just look around you in thailand. an amazingly resourceful people.

Poor Tax, he still doesn’t get it.

Typical dentist, isolated, arrogant, parochial and tunnel visioned.

Tax, the ERG/UKIP/Tory dinosaur rhetoric that the EU was a single entity threatening the Engerlandian sovereignty by taking over their institutions, stealing profits, their women and the food off their tables was a lie, an invention of the bigoted right wing trading on xenophobia.

Tax, only the stupid, the credulous, the ignorant, the naive and the bigoted ever believed that drivel. It was spurious propaganda propelling the right wing Tories and their bankster hedge fund shills into power in circumstances that simply was not available to them otherwise. Osborne warned Cameron that his referendum was a terrible mistake but he took no heed of the danger. And now the damage is done.

Given that those with the meanest of intelligence, even you Tax, now realise despite all the rhetoric there has not been a single economic or social advantage to Brexit, the usual suspects among the ERG and their supporters, the Telegraph, the Mail, Express etc, are reduced to peddling the nonsense that the EU is doomed to extinction and therefore Brexitonia and its population of little Engerlandians were right to quit.

Tax, it’s bollocks.The EU is merely an association of 27 independent countries united in their membership of a bloc sharing unfettered trade and free movement, it is not a separate entity formed under an imaginary caucus you evidently stupidly believe. What each country does outside the remit of their socio-economic bloc obligations for their own material benefit is a matter for each member state to consider how best to exercise their sovereignty in the pursuit of trade abroad. Every country has had its freedom to do this since the 1950s. Your stupid idea that a Franco-Teutonic alliance was luring Britain into a subjugated role supporting a European superstate always was bollocks and a myth peddled by the Tory right wing.

Tax, you lapped this shit up like mother’s milk and still do, you dull witted blinkered old sap. Grow up and get your head out of your arse.

And stop quoting Ambrose Prickhard of the Daily Telegraph, for fuck’s sake. He is a silly cvunt who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow.

The current situation in the UK has little to do with government incompetence????!!!!!

You cupid stunt, Truss trashed the £ and nearly destroyed the entire pension industry taking the financial sectordown with it, a fucking disaster the repercussions of which the Bank of England has said will last several years.

And the £60 billions Sunak spunked away on fraudulent claims and on Tory shills trading redundant Covid PPE??!!

And Sunak inflating a faux property boom by suspending tax on home purchases that will mean thousands will suffer insolvency in the short term???!!

Tax, your Tories, your Brexit, your idiocy, are all no more than a testament to national folly.