[Ann Drysdale]

"I cannot believe a nation full of sane people voted for this"

To be fair, only half of them did.

[Don Jones]

I hope this doesn’t presage the U.S. election in November. Anyone is delusional who thinks Clinton (loathsome though she be) has a sure beeline to the White House. Look, the intellectual/academic pinheads and business elites got Brexit wrong! That is a sobering outcome.

My prediction is that Germany and France will punish the UK by speeding up the unraveling. Britain wants two years to make the transition as calm as possible. We’ll have to see.

[Bill Carpenter]

"I am astonished. Staggered. Humbled. I should never have lost faith in my countrymen. Those bold, brave, beautiful British voters." Tim Stanley, The Telegraph

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Ann Drysdale

I've lost you, Bill. Scotland voted to leave what? They've had two such votes recently and voted to stay in both. I think. But perhaps I've lost the entire plot...

Sorry, I was typing rapidly in my shock and confusion. On another subject, I found this on the Bloomberg site overnight:

""Ahead of the vote, Morgan Stanley indicated it could shift its local headquarters to Dublin or Frankfurt after a Brexit. Citigroup Inc. would “rebalance” its European operations, a company memo showed.

Deutsche Bank AG chief executive officer John Cryan said last month that it would be “counter-intuitive” to trade euro zone products such as Italian government bonds out of London if Britain was no longer part of the EU.

In the case of HSBC, the relocated positions would be in the global banking and markets unit, which employs about 5,000 people in London, Gulliver said, citing requirements under MiFID II, the EU rules covering everything from derivatives trading to bond pricing.

Japanese brokerage Daiwa Securities Group Inc. said it would need to set up a business in the EU that replicated or replaced some functions in London, according to a memo to employees ahead of the vote. Under European banking law, financial firms not based in the EU need an authorized presence to do business there."

And someone on facebook suggested leaving was a good thing, and received this comment:

"How can one possibly make the best of it? Scotland will break away. There goes the oil. Northern Ireland will break away. The financial sector will no longer have a reason for being, and all those folks will leave for Dublin, Paris, Germany. All those nice shiny buildings will empty out, manufacturing and trade will dive. What will be left? An agricultural country, where the farmers just lost 7B in subsidies?"

And here, in this country, it seems possible voters will jump off a very similar cliff. As the poet said: "The world is lunatic. This is the last ride."

Best,

Bill

[Mary McLean]

I propose that London, Oxford, Cambridge, Northern Ireland and Scotland secede from this crazy country. We can call ourselves LOCNIS.

The most telling analysis I've seen is a plot of percentage of the residents with higher education vs the strength of the Leave vote: an extremely tight inverse correlation. The outliers were mainly in Scotland, where they voted Remain regardless of education level: link

[Matt Q]

On the plus side there's that £315 million a week that'll be pouring into the NHS ...

Or more realistically, a Tory government that will continue to sell off and privatise everything this country owns, including the NHS, but which will now also be able to get rid of that pesky "costly" legislation that protects people in work from getting screwed over; a Tory government that will, of course, be shafting the poor and disabled with even deeper austerity measures and punishments that they'll justify as necessary in the face of the inevitable negative economic consequences of leaving the EU. Oh, and tax cuts for the better off, while they're at it, because, you know, the rich work harder when they're rewarded and the poor work harder the greater their proximity to poverty.

Yup, out of the EU it's more power for "us".

p.s. Mary, Brighton & Hove voted 68.6% to remain, so count us in.

[Michael Cantor]

I think this sums it up well.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Anyone who thinks this is a good thing, is seriously out of touch with reality.

I can't help wondering what the result would have been if the polls and bookmakers had not been so confident that Bremain would prevail. 28 percent did not even bother to cast their vote.

And no, I am not going to say anything more on the subject in this thread.

[David Anthony]

Originally Posted by Michael Cantor

I think this sums it up well.

That's a cracker, Michael.

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling

I can't help wondering what the result would have been if the polls and bookmakers had not been so confident that Bremain would prevail. 28 percent did not even bother to cast their vote.

I'm starting to see an analysis believing Cameron will go, and someone like Boris will replace him. The new guy will make loud departure noises, but after six months or a year will say... "you know, on second thought..."

How likely that scenario is, I don't know, but I'm hearing it from some of my European friends...

Best,

Bill