Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbrumlow | Hacker News Reader

Lots of things are going to change. Things worked before the EU. I am sure things will continue to work after the exit.

I hate this argument with a passion. Yes, things will continue to "work". That's an incredibly low bar, though. It's quite possible that if the worst happens, there will be a substantial number of deaths and long-term, lingering economic damage. It could potentially take decades to recover economically, and have relatively little if any upside.

Well, for some value of 'worked'. Few people would actually want to go back to early 70s Britain. And note that the UK was in EFTA back then; it was not as isolated as it will be in a no-deal scenario.

This is an area with little effect on the average citizen, but I have to say I'd never have expected it to be a Tory government to exile financial services from London.

No, things that aren't yet determined how or if they are going to "work" are those relating to shipment of food and medicine. There is a very high risk of short-term chaos. Considering that in 2018 there were a few days without fresh food simply because of two feet of snow, people are really underestimating the potential risks here.

Britain isn’t going to turn into some Mad Max wasteland like some claim, but it will be worse off. The big thing is that on average the larger more open market will have more growth than the smaller more closed one. That growth will be compounded over the years. In several decades people in Britain will be asking why people in Poland have a better standard of living than them.

> In several decades people in Britain will be asking why people in Poland have a better standard of living than them.

In case this ever happens - it won't - this will be attributed to the EU pumping billions into Poland's budget every year. Net benefit to Poland is higher than the UK's yearly contribution to the EU budget nowadays.

That was when the other EU countries weren’t a giant block though, it’ll be harder to do things like pit France against Germany to cut a better deal.

So you're happy to have no PC to access Hacker News, for sure no Smartphone, not even a "dumb" mobile phone. No YouTube, Netflix, Amazon. Yes things worked back then but I doubt many people would want to roll back all technical progress since then. Brexit is the legal equivalent to that and any deal IMHO can merely be an attempt in damage limitation at least for the foreseeable future.

Other than the two world wars and before that the millennia of fighting and bloodshed, sure.

And London was a major financial centre well before the creation of the EU.

History. And the EU didn't exist then as an alernate location for banks to access a large economy.

EU GDP: $19.2T UK GDP: $2.6T

Yeah but the reasons for being the case haven't really changed. English speaking country, stable and predictable legal framework, cosmopolitan city. Nothing to do with GDP. All the noise I hear (or read in newspapers) tend to go along banks moving as little staff and activity as they can get away with and staff being reluctant to move. And Paris being mentioned as a prefered location because of its proximity to London (eurostar).

> English speaking country, stable and predictable legal framework, cosmopolitan city.

English speaking being the only real differentiator here and probably the most critical reason. However that only goes so far. And what for sure has changed is that we're down from 20+ currencies before to one huge single market with mostly the same currency.

How that all factors in is impossible to say, but to argue that nothing has/will change seems equally unrealistic as the over-the top reporting of the media suggesting the UK banking sector will collapse. Things will go on, but my bet would be there will be a considerable hit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com