There’s been a re-occurring theme throughout my lifetime. I get told that some enormous disaster is inevitable, or that it will occur if a certain course of action isn’t taken. I am promised death, carnage, and misery on an unimaginable scale. But the disaster never happens. In my lifetime I’ve survived the “population bomb”, ozone depletion, the Y2K bug, the triump of Islamic terrorism that would occur if we didn’t win the war in Iraq, the budget “sequester” in 2013 that would financially ruin the USA, the Rapture, and the Mayan Calendar Apocalypse, just to name a few.
And we can now add another to that list: Brexit. Many folks told us, before it happened, that if the British voted for Leave, economic disaster would result. After they voted for Leave, those same folks told us that the economic disaster was occurring. Here’s an example:
Okay, so the idiots did it; they broke the UK … bigoted, emotional, don’t-need-to-know-facts impulses that powered the Brexit vote … It should be noted that all the horrible things that are currently happening because of Brexit were called by the very experts that Michael Gove asserted, correctly, alas, that voters were tired of. This does seem to suggest that perhaps, for future reference, experts might be listened to from time to time. … the UK economy is likely to plunge into a recession … I like many Americans have retirement stock investments, which look to take a 2008-sized pummel.
There were countless other examples just like that, in which people declared that the largely working-class voters who voted for Brexit had been proven to be utter idiots and that the economic chaos was not only engulfing Britain but would spread to America and worldwide, while the experts have proven their superior knowledge once and for all. So what actually happened?
Stocks? The day after Brexit, the FTSE 100 plunged. This was widely cited by those who opposed Brexit as proof of the economic disaster unleashed by the idiots. A few days later, it had recovered what it lost and was going up. Opponents then told us to ignore the FTSE 100 and focus on the FTSE 250 instead. A few days later that index was going up as well. Over the past year, the FTSE 250 is up 12% and the FTSE 100 almost 20%.
Currency? The pound plunged after the vote. 1 pounds now equals 1.18 Euros, so the pound is worth about what is was worth 4 years ago. No one said that the exchange rate was a disaster 4 years ago, so there’s no reason to view it as a disaster now.
What else? Unemployment is down. Economic growth is up. In short, the economic catastrophe that was guaranteed to happen simply didn’t happen.
Of course, Britain and the EU are now entering a new stage of negotiations. There’s guaranteed to be uncertainy and some bad moments in the process, and doubtlessly some swings in the stock market and the currency will occur, and the same voices will clamber out with a “see I told you so” line. But overall, those who predicted total devastation from Brexit have been totally wrong. Those who predicted worldwide economic disaster were even more wrong.