CapitalistImperialistPig

Was Brexit about immigration? Tyler Cowen comes down on the side of a nuanced yes . As I interpret what happened, ultimately the vote was about preserving the English nation, and yes I use those last two italicized words deliberately; reread Fintan O’Toole. Go back and read English history. For centuries, England has been filled with English people, plus some others from nearby regions. Go visit Norfolk and also stop in Great Yarmouth, once described by Charles Dickens as “…the finest place in the universe,” and which, for whatever decline it may have experienced, still looks and feels like England. London does not. As Zack Beauchamp notes (in a piece which is mostly an example of what I am criticizing): “…the number of foreign-born people living in the UK has gone from 2.3 million in 1993 (when Britain joined the EU) to 8.2 million in 2014.” In terms of distribution and influence, the impact of those numbers is much larger yet. London, the cultural center, business center, an...

Thursday was a bad day for those who thought the EU was a good idea, even if it was badly implemented. George Soros thinks that its disintegration is now all but irreversible, and he is hardly alone in that opinion. What would need to be done to fix it? I have no idea, but as usual I won't let that stop me: A simple federal constitution in which citizens rights are outlined and federal governmental powers specified and delimited, with no special privileges. It should be short enough for any citizen to read it twenty minutes. A democratically elected government with real powers - possibly a two chambered parliament modeled after the US. Unified defense, trade, and finance. Does that sound a lot like a United States of Europe? Well, duh, but one could initially make the central state weak enough permit a lot of local autonomy. You want to be able to avoid situations like the Portugal, Ireland, Greece etc. crisis where in effect Germany made decisions for everybody and the h...

I mean aside from the usual idiots: Cameron, Johnson, British geezers..., etc. Kevin Drum takes a look at a long list of suspects. Here he is on Angela Merkel: For all the praise she gets, Angela Merkel has been one of the most disastrous European leaders in my lifetime. She's as responsible for Brexit as anyone I can think of, thanks to two catastrophic decisions she made. The first was her insistence on punishing Greece following its collapse after the Great Recession. There's plenty of blame to go around on all sides for the Greece debacle, but as the continent's economic leader Germany held most of the high cards during negotiations over Greece's fate. Merkel had a choice: (a) punish Greece for running up unsustainable debts and lying about them, or (b) accept that Germany bore much of the blame itself for the crisis and that Greece had no way of rescuing itself thanks to the straitjacket of the common currency. The former was a crowd pleaser. The latter was u...

The real question in my mind is can the EU survive this amputation? It's not very functional and appears incapable of reforming itself. It's most serious problems, I think, are lack of unifying political and economic institutions. With nationalist sentiment running high, any chance for reform seems remote. The whole shaky contraption could easily come apart. I suspect England will wake up with a major hangover, but I guess that it is unlikely to be of much strategic or economic importance in the future.

I predict that the divorce will be nasty, with major fights over child custody and support. Nikkei currently down 1335 points, Japanese seem to be taking it hard. Pound down 16 cents. Predicted Brussels response: "And the horse you rode in on."

From the NYT: Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? ANSWER VOTES PCT. Remain 12,021,165 48% Leave 12,814,092 52 306 out of 382 counting areas 11:40 PM ET Looks like it might be over. Pound is down $0.13 on the dollar. Asian markets and pound crashing.