Category - News

Story #1 – The Bank of England has cut interest rates to 0.25%. This is the first cut since 2009 (during the major recession) and the lowest ever rate. The Bank has also said rates could go lower still if the economy worsens.

Remember that lower interest rates are all right if you owe money, but not if you are saving it. It means that a typical mortgage might be £25 cheaper per month, but the annual interest on saving of £10,000 would be £25 less. The theoretical purpose of the rate cut is that since saving money is not advantageous, people go out and spend it, thus stimulating the economy.

The GBP was immediately affected by this announcement, and fell 1.5% on the day (and it’s already a further 1% down the day after that).

Story #2 – A Survey has shown that recruitment was hit in July as a direct result of Brexit.

Job placements in July fell more sharply than at any time since 2009. I’ll remind you again that 2009 was in the middle of the great recession. Those who took part in the data gathering exercise stated Brexit was to blame.

The Bank of England has already said it expects unemployment to rise to 5.5% over the next two years. It currently stands at 4.9%, and for all practical purposes has been falling each year since 2012.

Story #3 – Nissan says it is “reasonably optimistic” that things will be all right as a result of Brexit. This is roughly the same as being “reasonably optimistic” that you’re going to win the lottery this week. The hopeful lotto winner will have invested £2 on his or her numbers, and it would be foolish not to be optimistic, otherwise they may just as well have thrown that two quid in the river. Nissan, in comparison, has invested billions in Sunderland. So you can see the parallel – it is hardly going to openly flush that kind of money down the toilet. The CEO has virtually contradicted himself by warning:

…[further] Investment [in Sunderland] depends on the outcome of UK-EU talks on Brexit

You see, Sunderland is a European plant which happens to be based in the UK. Most of its exports are to Europe. And he added that:

…there was “no doubt” that prices for Renaults, and other cars made in Europe and sold in the UK, will rise due to falling value of sterling.

Of course, report after report makes it clear that Brexit has screwed up the GBP, and what the Nissan CEO is really wondering is how the hell he is going to keep on explaining the UK’s death spiral as a reason to keep manufacturing in Sunderland.

I should also point out that they’re not very bright in Sunderland. They were the first vote in on referendum day and they voted to leave the EU by a large margin. I don’t think “irony” would be the right word to describe the situation if Nissan upped tents, particularly when you consider the existing unemployment situation in the North East.

But don’t worry, everyone. The Nissan guy is “optimistic” and I’m sure a multi-billion pound manufacturing plant and the associated multi-multi-billion pound bill Nissan would have if they needed to move it is completely irrelevant  as a source of his optimism. It more likely comes from the same source as that guy at the soup kitchen in Blackpool, who thinks that foreigners are preventing him from getting a job.

More “excellent” news resulting from the EU Referendum. Foxtons, a high-profile London estate agent, has announced a 43% fall in profits. It blames this on Brexit.

Of course, as any Brexiter knows full well, it simply is not possible for anything bad to come out of the vote to leave the EU, and the fact that Foxtons has seen its profits fall by 30% since the result must be down to some other reason. Possibly immigrants. Or Donald Trump.

The result of the referendum to leave Europe is likely to lead to a prolonged period of further uncertainty and we do not expect London residential property sales markets to show signs of recovery before the end of the year [said Foxtons CEO, Nic Budden]

…the UK’s biggest building society, the Nationwide, said that the Brexit effect on the property market and house prices could take months to become clear.

But remember. Britain may collapse economically. The pound may end up being worth less than a dollar. Unemployment may rise. Inflation may also rise. Fuel prices may rise. House prices may rise, or the markets fall. The evidence suggests these things are happening, and experts suggest that they will.

But everything will be all right. That guy from the soup kitchen in Blackpool said so.

Mind you, the swings are fifty feet high, whereas you need a magnifying glass to spot the roundabouts.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s news that GSK is investing £275m in itself to expand in the UK (note that GSK is worth over £80 billion – the investment is about 0.3% of that), and the Brexiters’ fanfares declaring how right they were all along about leaving the EU, the pendulum swung back the other way today as Lloyds Bank announced job losses and branch closures – citing the effects of Brexit as one of the reasons.

Lloyds was already in the middle of cutting 9,000 jobs and closing 200 branches, but it has announced a further 3,000 job cuts and a further 200 branch closures. Brexiters can only see Lloyds’ pre-tax profits, which were up 101% on last year, and their army of Internet trolls is consequently out in force against Lloyds. In reality, Lloyds’ underlying profits fell by 5%, and their CEO foresees a “deceleration of growth” as a result of Brexit.

So, in the space of a couple of days, we have an “investment” which may generate a few dozen jobs (ironically, most of them up in Scotland), and a much more significant loss of 3000 jobs at Lloyds.

And still the Brexiters think they were right.

All the little Brexiters are fawning over this story. Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) is apparently investing in the UK “despite Brexit”. The part they conveniently play down is this:

There is also the benefit of a cheaper pound when producing products bound for foreign markets.

There’s the rub, you see. GSK already has several manufacturing sites in the UK, so it’s not as if it has chosen to come to the UK ahead of anywhere else. I used to work in this industry and I know how much it would cost to shift pharmaceutical production to another site, especially if it was one in another country – the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) would make it nigh on impossible, and it would raise regulatory issues for long-standing products that had hitherto been “overlooked”.

A decision like this, reportedly worth £275 million, is not something you scrape together in a few weeks – it’ll have been years in the planning. The only outwardly visible signs for the UK economy will be a few dozen extra jobs for high-flying graduates, and if GSK are even remotely similar to the outfit I used to work for, they’ll try and keep that to a minimum anyway in order to maximise the benefit to themselves. A large part of that £275 million will pay for the internal arseing about that will be required. Basically, GSK is investing in itself.

The majority of GSK’s UK-manufactured goods are exported, and the collapse of the GBP following Brexit means selling GBP products on a USD market is highly beneficial to whoever is doing it. As long as the UK doesn’t physically fall into the sea, and as long as the GBP remains weak, GSK will coin it.

Don’t get me wrong, GSK are not doing anything that any other company wouldn’t (hell, they even offered me a job once). But they’re not doing it to save the UK. It’s for the short- to medium term benefit of their shareholders.

Just as I suspected. The day after I wrote this, I see that the toilet paper version of the Daily Mail – another right-wing, pro-Brexit misinformation machine – is trumpeting that £275m is being invested “in Britain”. It isn’t. It’s being invested by GSK, in GSK. Britain will get a few dozen new jobs out of it.

Yet another story demonstrating how wrong the EU referendum result was.

Make no mistake about it – the main reason many Brexiters voted to leave was down to their deep hatred of foreigners. The referendum result released the flood gates, and Brexiters immediately began showing their true colours.

The Crown Prosecution Service is currently processing “a record number of hate crimes”.

Amber Rudd, the new Home Secretary, laughably says:

…[hatred has] no place whatsoever in a 21st Century Great Britain.

Actually, Amber, your party’s idiotic decision to hold a referendum on EU membership has created a f___ing huge place for it. The vote to leave the EU has pushed us back into the mid-20th Century economically and socially, so don’t try and act all surprised at the venom people are belching up. In fact, in places where the “Leave” vote was high, and where this kind of thing was always on the back burner, they’ve moved back to the Stone Age. She adds:

We are Great Britain because we are united by values such as democracy, free speech, mutual respect and opportunity for all.

No we’re not. We’re “Great Britain” – especially in the minds of most Brexiters – because of all the foreigners we conquered during the time of The Empire. The reality is that we are a small island which has just cut its ties with mainland Europe at least a hundred years after most of Europe became strong enough to give us a punch in the mouth if we got uppity with them again.

The only way of reversing this tide of hatred (and that of financial collapse) is to stop Brexit before it happens. There should never have been a referendum, and anyone with an IQ greater than that of snot knows it.