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Comment by Gregaros | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been seeing people call this GEXIT, or global exit.

As a comparison to Brexit? At what point even momentarily was that in a worse situation, nevermind as an ongoing matter?

Are you pretty young? The narrative when it was happening was pretty catastrophic. I remember reading about people not being able to get prescriptions, for example, because no one knew how imports worked.

I don't know how things panned out, but the discussions in the early days around Brexit were absolutely on par or even worse than what we're seeing in these two days of discussions around tariffs.

I don't know what 'pretty young' is, apart from condescending, but I voted in it, so I remember as well as you do I imagine.

Regardless of contemporaneous comparisons, the up-thread comment I initially replied to suggested there was some ongoing worse 'crisis' in the UK than the current situation in the US, if they meant to refer to Brexit it was not clear at all, regardless of whether anyone things that's an ongoing worse situation. (Except that the fact it's not clear really suggests it isn't...)

Sorry, the implication is that this is far worse than Brexit, but that this is the US’s Global Exit, riffing off the strong negative connotations in te US. I saw it from on Bluesky, but that linked here https://theradicalfederalist.substack.com/p/the-neoreactiona... - so, being framed as much worse than Brexit.

No worries, yours was clearer, it was the first indication I had that anyone meant to compare to Brexit, I just asked to clarify. 'up-thread comment' I meant was the bdelmas one I replied to that referred only to 'crisis like the UK is going through' without elaboration.

> I don't know what 'pretty young' is, apart from condescending, but I voted in it,

'Pretty young' would imply maybe you haven't been voting for very long, and are likely under 25.

(if they share the same definition) then no, I am not.

An under 25 year old today wouldn't have been able to have voted on the 2016 referendum anyway.

What? The didn't happen, or it's not how it happened. Are you pretty young to remember Brexit?

The UK voted for Brexit in 2016, but it was up to the UK itself to invoke it with the EU. They took almost 4 years to do it in January of 2020 after 4 years of arguing about it with a transition period and trade talks with the EU until the end of 2020. It wasn't a surprise and "no one knew how imports worked". Yeah people online made all sort of wild hyperbolic scenarios, but trade was unaffected until the end of 2020. There were shortages in the UK around that time, but I wonder if you remember what happened shortly after January 31st of 2020?

The prescription drug shortages is still a problem in the UK. It's not because no one still knows how imports work in the UK, 5 years after Brexit. It's because the overall imports and exports in the UK has been falling since Brexit. Because the UK economy hasn't been doing great. Brexit, COVID, and then Ukraine/Russian energy dependency came in a pretty bad time for the UK.

> They took almost 4 years to do it in January of 2020 after 4 years of arguing about it with a transition period and trade talks with the EU until the end of 2020.

Oh, longer than that. Some transition arrangements are _still in practice in place_, for instance see https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-brexit-border-checks-dela... . Brexit is not done, yet; things will get worse before they get better.

Note that these tariffs largely don’t take effect til the 9th. That’s when we start seeing what the second-order effects are.

Frankly, the first order effects as well.

Right now we're seeing the 0th order effects.

Currently, Trump’s tariffs have kinda broken the stock markets, and caused some difficult-to-measure economic damage (investments will have been delayed or cancelled, that sort of thing). If, tomorrow, Trump chokes on a well-done steak, or Congress puts him back in his box (remember, his ability to do _anything_ with tariffs is entirely within the gift of Congress), or otherwise the tariffs go away, then the markets will pretty much spring back, and the economic hit will be small enough that it’s hard to measure.

While estimates of the damage done by Brexit are of course very politically sensitive, nearly everyone agrees that some substantial damage has been done, particularly to trade and jobs (one estimate has the UK with _over 2 million_ fewer jobs today than it would otherwise have, Goldman Sachs says that the UK economy is 5% smaller than it ‘should’ be, etc etc)

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