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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

That I think is the saving grace of Brexit. Investor confidence in Italian public debt will evaporate sooner or later, and I don’t see Germany allowing and paying for a bailout of Italy, given how they reacted to the bailout of Greece. The UK will likely look like a safe heaven for capitals when that happens.

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How does Brexit make the UK attractive in the event of a near-term Eurozone crisis? The grim economic outlook if the UK's major trade partners are all in deep recession isn't improved by it having lost a lot of that trade earlier in the year for other reasons, and its economy isn't going to reinvent itself overnight.

Because if (or when) Italy is about to introduce capital controls to prevent its banking system from collapsing, investors will not make a decision based on the industrial outlook of the UK, but based on the stability of its legal and banking system, and its independance from Italy's financial woes.

But the stability of the UK's legal and banking system receives precisely zero benefit from Brexit (quite the opposite) and the UK gains further "independence from Italy's financial woes" from Brexit only inasmuch as it would lose some of the trade it might be expected to lose in the event of a Eurozone recession a little earlier. (I could just about see how the UK would benefit from being less exposed to Italian financial woes if you anticipated an EU policy response of requiring Member States to contribute to bailouts and/or buy up Italian debt, but that's the bit you ruled out, and I'd see as being unlikely to be applied to non-Eurozone states)

No, they were trying to rope in even non eurozone member states.

Not to mention the UK won't be in the hook for part of the bailout. Sounds good to me.

Investors already voted against pound (look at the exchange rate). Brexit shown them that U.K. is no longer predictable and stable. And since after Brexit it will be equally expensive to move funds from Eurozone to U.K. or to any other country - there are likely to choose somewhere else.

The city of London has been going for hundreds of years. It thrived before the EU, it will thrive after.

You forget that we don't have a colonial empire anymore.

It existed long before empire.

Italy has had the same debt levels for almost 30 years now. Who could lose faith, has already lost it a long time ago. And a lot of that debt is internally held anyway.

If necessary, Italy will again be put under special measures as it was at the end of Berlusconi’s run; but it will never, ever default. Italians will self-tax to death before they default on their public debt, because too much of that debt is with themselves.

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