Brexit - UK loses 6.6 billion a quarter since referendum, S&P says

[Denzil_DC]

LONDON (Reuters) - The United Kingdom has lost £6.6 billion in economic activity every quarter since it voted to leave the European Union, according to S&P Global Ratings, the latest company to estimate the damage from Brexit.

In a report published on Thursday, the ratings agency’s senior economist, Boris Glass, said the world’s fifth-biggest economy would have been about 3 percent larger by the end of 2018 if the country had not voted in a June 2016 referendum to leave the EU.
...
“Immediately after the referendum, the pound fell by about 18 percent. This was the single most pertinent indicator of the impact of the vote and the drag it created, via inflation, has been spreading through the economy,” he said.
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The estimate is slightly lower than an assessment by Goldman Sachs earlier this week, which pegged the cost to the economy at about 600 million pounds per week. That equates to 7.8 billion pounds a quarter, according to Reuters calculations.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-s-p-idUSKCN1RG0QW

And now the good news:

HS2 go-ahead controversial and difficult, admits Boris Johnson

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced that the controversial HS2 high-speed rail link will be built.

The first phase of the route will travel between London and Birmingham, with a second phase going to Manchester and Leeds.

"It has been a controversial and difficult decision," Mr Johnson said.

The prime minister added he was going to appoint a full-time minister to oversee the project and criticised the HS2 company's management of the scheme.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51461597

The identity of the minister is as yet unknown, but Chris Grayling has to be in the running.

Meanwhile, Johnson seems intent on spaffing £20 billion and counting on a bridge from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere (with apologies to those who live in the middle of nowhere, as I've done at various times in my life).

Slated to link Portpatrick in south-west Scotland and Larne on the east coast of Northern Ireland as the currently favoured route, the progress of the bridge (or tunnel, tunnel/bridge, details, details ...) will apparently be unhindered by the facts that the infrastructure at either end as it stands would have no chance of coping with increased traffic flows by road, the Irish and mainland UK rail gauges are incompatible, the current ferry services seem to have no problem coping with traffic, and whatever might eventually be cobbled together would have to span Beaufort's Dyke - a 30-mile by 2-mile chasm up to 1,000 feet deep that's been used in the past as a messy and ill-bounded massive dumping ground for incalculable amounts of surplus munitions (MoD estimates run at a million tons or more, but record-keeping has been patchy to non-existent), nuclear waste and anything else governments of the time felt like ditching out of sight and out of mind, which periodically throws up items such as old incendiary bombs to litter the Irish and Scottish coasts.

Evidence to the Scottish Parliament in 2000 found that:

exhaustive investigations into exactly what munitions were present eventually revealed that alongside the everyday variety of bombs, grenades, rockets, bullets and explosives might lie a bewildering cocktail of canisters of sarin, tabun, mustard gas, cyanide, phosgene and anthrax. Phosphorus bombs abound and, in June 1997, it was finally revealed that radioactive waste containing both caesium 137 and radium 226 had been systematically dumped in Beaufort's dyke in the 1950s. It has now been freely admitted that some of that waste was thrown overboard in 40-gallon steel drums encased in concrete.

Now that's what I call Project Fear.

[Wellstone ruled]

1. The UK is about to become a

financial nightmare. Believe they now are behind California in total Economic output.

[Karadeniz]

2. Obama advised them not to leave. Trump advised them to leave.