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> Hopefully for the US they won't go in a similar crisis like the UK is going through... Err.. do tell about the UK's larger crisis than US'?

by OJFord 2y ago

Gregaros 2y ago
I’ve been seeing people call this GEXIT, or global exit.
- OJFord 2y ago
  As a comparison to Brexit? At what point even momentarily was that in a worse situation, nevermind as an ongoing matter?
  - losvedir 2y ago
    Are you pretty young? The narrative when it was happening was pretty catastrophic. I remember reading about people not being able to get prescriptions, for example, because no one knew how imports worked. I don't know how things panned out, but the discussions in the early days around Brexit were absolutely on par or even worse than what we're seeing in these two days of discussions around tariffs.
    - OJFord 2y ago
      I don't know what 'pretty young' is, apart from condescending, but I voted in it, so I remember as well as you do I imagine. Regardless of contemporaneous comparisons, the up-thread comment I initially replied to suggested there was some ongoing worse 'crisis' in the UK than the current situation in the US, if they meant to refer to Brexit it was not clear at all, regardless of whether anyone things that's an ongoing worse situation. (Except that the fact it's not clear really suggests it isn't...)
      - Gregaros 2y ago
        Sorry, the implication is that this is far worse than Brexit, but that this is the US’s Global Exit, riffing off the strong negative connotations in te US. I saw it from on Bluesky, but that linked here https://theradicalfederalist.substack.com/p/the-neoreactionary-exit https://theradicalfederalist.substack.com/p/the-neoreactiona... - so, being framed as much worse than Brexit.
        OJFord 2y ago
        No worries, yours was clearer, it was the first indication I had that anyone meant to compare to Brexit, I just asked to clarify. 'up-thread comment' I meant was the bdelmas one I replied to that referred only to 'crisis like the UK is going through' without elaboration.
      - lunarlull 2y ago
        > I don't know what 'pretty young' is, apart from condescending, but I voted in it, 'Pretty young' would imply maybe you haven't been voting for very long, and are likely under 25.
        OJFord 2y ago
        (if they share the same definition) then no, I am not. An under 25 year old today wouldn't have been able to have voted on the 2016 referendum anyway.
    - eddythompson80 2y ago
      What? The didn't happen, or it's not how it happened. Are you pretty young to remember Brexit? The UK voted for Brexit in 2016, but it was up to the UK itself to invoke it with the EU. They took almost 4 years to do it in January of 2020 after 4 years of arguing about it with a transition period and trade talks with the EU until the end of 2020. It wasn't a surprise and "no one knew how imports worked". Yeah people online made all sort of wild hyperbolic scenarios, but trade was unaffected until the end of 2020. There were shortages in the UK around that time, but I wonder if you remember what happened shortly after January 31st of 2020? The prescription drug shortages is still a problem in the UK. It's not because no one still knows how imports work in the UK, 5 years after Brexit. It's because the overall imports and exports in the UK has been falling since Brexit. Because the UK economy hasn't been doing great. Brexit, COVID, and then Ukraine/Russian energy dependency came in a pretty bad time for the UK.
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        > They took almost 4 years to do it in January of 2020 after 4 years of arguing about it with a transition period and trade talks with the EU until the end of 2020. Oh, longer than that. Some transition arrangements are _still in practice in place_, for instance see https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-brexit-border-checks-delay-eu-imports-food-prices-food-safety-fruits-vegetables/ https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-brexit-border-checks-dela... . Brexit is not done, yet; things will get worse before they get better.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      Note that these tariffs largely don’t take effect til the 9th. That’s when we start seeing what the second-order effects are.
      - BobaFloutist 2y ago
        Frankly, the first order effects as well. Right now we're seeing the 0th order effects.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Currently, Trump’s tariffs have kinda broken the stock markets, and caused some difficult-to-measure economic damage (investments will have been delayed or cancelled, that sort of thing). If, tomorrow, Trump chokes on a well-done steak, or Congress puts him back in his box (remember, his ability to do _anything_ with tariffs is entirely within the gift of Congress), or otherwise the tariffs go away, then the markets will pretty much spring back, and the economic hit will be small enough that it’s hard to measure. While estimates of the damage done by Brexit are of course very politically sensitive, nearly everyone agrees that some substantial damage has been done, particularly to trade and jobs (one estimate has the UK with _over 2 million_ fewer jobs today than it would otherwise have, Goldman Sachs says that the UK economy is 5% smaller than it ‘should’ be, etc etc)
bdelmas 2y ago
Well before what's happening now the US still was doing very strong on the economy (plus their advantage to be that big, their military advantage, them owning half of their continent, etc...). But with what is unfolding now... If you want to know more about the current situation in the UK I would recommend this video [1]. His channel is amazing for geopolitical content. [1] https://youtu.be/OTWDzMjgsEY?si=hxoB8ef_y2Qy4u0I https://youtu.be/OTWDzMjgsEY?si=hxoB8ef_y2Qy4u0I
- OJFord 2y ago
  If you can't give me any words that indicate what kind of crisis the UK is facing, while there's general agreement on 'Trump', 'tariffs', '(especially US) equities', 'the US dollar', 'global recession fears'... then I don't have time for your video recommendation.
- tdeck 2y ago
  It's interesting that this video is so focused on productivity since 2008, when a worker's income has been decoupled from productivity for decades.
- Centigonal 2y ago
  Some stats from this video: - The UK has one of the worst homelessness problems in Europe, with about 1 in 50 Londoners experiencing homelessness. - The UK economy stagnated for 10 years following 2008, resulting in a "lost decade" - The median disposable income in the UK was slightly lower than the US and Norway before the GFC by 6-8%, not it's 16-20% behind. IDK if I'd call this a crisis, i.e. people aren't rioting in the streets. That said, this is not the direction you want to be moving in as a developed country. The trend of people in formerly dominant countries electing leaders who keep making stupid own goals (increasing economic inequality, Brexit, gutting the NHS, gutting US foreign aid, tariff-pocalypse) is very worrying.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Ten times? More like two times: US population is around 340 000 000, 770 000 homeless. UK population is around 68 000 000, 354 000 homeless. (Possibly calculated more inclusively.) That's 0.23 % and 0.52 %. (Numbers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Kin... or more specifically from a govt department and a homelessness charity. The US figure "does not include those staying with friends or family because they do not have a place of their own".)
makeitdouble 2y ago
Reading the parent's comment I was expecting the UK GDP to have been plunging since Brexit, but that's not the case apparently[0]. Some sectors clearly profited from it, compensating for those who went down the drain. GDP isn't everything and from the outside the UK feel like in a very bad place, but I wonder what's the metric that really captures that status. Inequalities aren't getting that much wider as well. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/united-kingdom/gdp-gross-domestic-product https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...
- bdelmas 2y ago
  There is a lot of data to talk about that's why I linked the video directly in the other comment. Maybe check it out. For the GDP it may not look bad but compared to other countries and especially the US, the UK is going through what we call a "lost decade". Their GDP should be +25% higher than right now... That's just one (huge) metric talked about in the video.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Yup. Sadly, discussion of Brexit on HN is trash tier. Almost every claim about it you'll find here is completely wrong. Not in the sense of differing values or priorities, but in a "this is totally made up" kind of way. It's really concerning that so many people's understanding of the UK and Europe have suffered such a huge rupture with reality. The map is not the territory! Leaving the EU had no effect on the British economy. Not positive, not negative. Even the trade balance with the EU merely continued along its long term trend, so apparently the single market wasn't delivering any value in the end. The closest thing you can find to an economic impact was the currency dump that happened the moment the result was called, but the economy did fine in the post-referendum years and so those traders who panicked just took a bath and the currency recovered later. Not that a currency devaluation is such a bad thing for the UK anyway, its exports could use the help. Even some non-economic impacts failed to materialize, in both directions. The UK rejoined the Horizon research programme (supposedly a "cherry" that would be lost), but also the reduction in immigration that voters were promised didn't happen either, in fact immigration went into overdrive. A lot of people who support the EU don't realize any of this, partly because the news doesn't report on things that don't happen so they never hear about it. But mostly it's because they conflate predictions with reality. For example, there's someone saying in this thread that "the narrative was pretty catastrophic" followed by "I don't know how things panned out". And when I pointed out this lack of impact less than two weeks ago here, I got a reply that cited another pile of predictions as a refutation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43469356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43469356 It's a systemic problem that crops up in other areas too. During COVID modeling predictions were regularly repeated as if they'd already happened, and you see the same mental slippage in climate change discourse. The line between "we think this might happen", "this will happen" and "this has already happened" blurs to nothing.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 2y ago
Brexit was pretty bad for the UK proportional to the size of their population/economy, and is still causing problems even though the initial dislocation is over. If you think it's a lesser crisis, you could just say that. I haven't done the numbers to make an exact comparison, but they both have the qualities of being being abrupt, severe, and self-inflicted.
- OJFord 2y ago
  > If you think it's a lesser crisis, you could just say that. I do, but the principal reason I didn't say that is that I had no idea it's what the commenter I replied to was referring to. 'Brexit' feels mostly completely irrelevant / not a topic of concern or debate since at least the beginning of the pandemic five years ago. The vote was almost a decade ago. 'If bdelmas thinks it's like Brexit, they could just say that', to paraphrase your own comment.
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago
    The vote didn’t implement anything. Britain didn’t actually leave the EU until 2020. Brexit is as of much concern in Britain, still, as Trump is - because it underlies their entire shaken economy. You think some tariffs are bad? Ok now what if Trump simultaneously tore up every trade agreement? And cancelled the visas of every European citizen in the country, who happened to make up 10% of the medical sector?
    - lazyasciiart 2y ago
      Oh, you’re actually British, how surprising. Perhaps it’s only still a topic among people who understood what was going to happen.
    - OJFord 2y ago
      Alright take 2020 then: year started $1.32/£, ended at 1.37. The world was shaken by SARS-nCoV-2019, but I do not remember us feeling particularly extra shaken by Brexit crisis. That is not really relevant anyway, the up-thread suggestion was that there was some current ongoing crisis more significant than anything happening in the US. That user didn't even mention Brexit, but if that is what they meant, no, I assure you it's predominantly Trump and tax year end stuff in our news.

> Hopefully for the US they won't go in a similar crisis like the UK is going through... Err.. do tell about the UK's larger crisis than US'?

by OJFord 2y ago

> Hopefully for the US they won't go in a similar crisis like the UK is going through... Err.. do tell about the UK's larger crisis than US'?

Gregaros 2y ago

I’ve been seeing people call this GEXIT, or global exit.

OJFord 2y ago
As a comparison to Brexit? At what point even momentarily was that in a worse situation, nevermind as an ongoing matter?
- losvedir 2y ago
  Are you pretty young? The narrative when it was happening was pretty catastrophic. I remember reading about people not being able to get prescriptions, for example, because no one knew how imports worked. I don't know how things panned out, but the discussions in the early days around Brexit were absolutely on par or even worse than what we're seeing in these two days of discussions around tariffs.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    I don't know what 'pretty young' is, apart from condescending, but I voted in it, so I remember as well as you do I imagine. Regardless of contemporaneous comparisons, the up-thread comment I initially replied to suggested there was some ongoing worse 'crisis' in the UK than the current situation in the US, if they meant to refer to Brexit it was not clear at all, regardless of whether anyone things that's an ongoing worse situation. (Except that the fact it's not clear really suggests it isn't...)
    - Gregaros 2y ago
      Sorry, the implication is that this is far worse than Brexit, but that this is the US’s Global Exit, riffing off the strong negative connotations in te US. I saw it from on Bluesky, but that linked here https://theradicalfederalist.substack.com/p/the-neoreactionary-exit https://theradicalfederalist.substack.com/p/the-neoreactiona... - so, being framed as much worse than Brexit.
      - OJFord 2y ago
        No worries, yours was clearer, it was the first indication I had that anyone meant to compare to Brexit, I just asked to clarify. 'up-thread comment' I meant was the bdelmas one I replied to that referred only to 'crisis like the UK is going through' without elaboration.
    - lunarlull 2y ago
      > I don't know what 'pretty young' is, apart from condescending, but I voted in it, 'Pretty young' would imply maybe you haven't been voting for very long, and are likely under 25.
      - OJFord 2y ago
        (if they share the same definition) then no, I am not. An under 25 year old today wouldn't have been able to have voted on the 2016 referendum anyway.
  - eddythompson80 2y ago
    What? The didn't happen, or it's not how it happened. Are you pretty young to remember Brexit? The UK voted for Brexit in 2016, but it was up to the UK itself to invoke it with the EU. They took almost 4 years to do it in January of 2020 after 4 years of arguing about it with a transition period and trade talks with the EU until the end of 2020. It wasn't a surprise and "no one knew how imports worked". Yeah people online made all sort of wild hyperbolic scenarios, but trade was unaffected until the end of 2020. There were shortages in the UK around that time, but I wonder if you remember what happened shortly after January 31st of 2020? The prescription drug shortages is still a problem in the UK. It's not because no one still knows how imports work in the UK, 5 years after Brexit. It's because the overall imports and exports in the UK has been falling since Brexit. Because the UK economy hasn't been doing great. Brexit, COVID, and then Ukraine/Russian energy dependency came in a pretty bad time for the UK.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      > They took almost 4 years to do it in January of 2020 after 4 years of arguing about it with a transition period and trade talks with the EU until the end of 2020. Oh, longer than that. Some transition arrangements are _still in practice in place_, for instance see https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-brexit-border-checks-delay-eu-imports-food-prices-food-safety-fruits-vegetables/ https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-brexit-border-checks-dela... . Brexit is not done, yet; things will get worse before they get better.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Note that these tariffs largely don’t take effect til the 9th. That’s when we start seeing what the second-order effects are.
    - BobaFloutist 2y ago
      Frankly, the first order effects as well. Right now we're seeing the 0th order effects.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Currently, Trump’s tariffs have kinda broken the stock markets, and caused some difficult-to-measure economic damage (investments will have been delayed or cancelled, that sort of thing). If, tomorrow, Trump chokes on a well-done steak, or Congress puts him back in his box (remember, his ability to do _anything_ with tariffs is entirely within the gift of Congress), or otherwise the tariffs go away, then the markets will pretty much spring back, and the economic hit will be small enough that it’s hard to measure. While estimates of the damage done by Brexit are of course very politically sensitive, nearly everyone agrees that some substantial damage has been done, particularly to trade and jobs (one estimate has the UK with _over 2 million_ fewer jobs today than it would otherwise have, Goldman Sachs says that the UK economy is 5% smaller than it ‘should’ be, etc etc)

bdelmas 2y ago

Well before what's happening now the US still was doing very strong on the economy (plus their advantage to be that big, their military advantage, them owning half of their continent, etc...). But with what is unfolding now... If you want to know more about the current situation in the UK I would recommend this video [1]. His channel is amazing for geopolitical content. [1] https://youtu.be/OTWDzMjgsEY?si=hxoB8ef_y2Qy4u0I https://youtu.be/OTWDzMjgsEY?si=hxoB8ef_y2Qy4u0I

OJFord 2y ago
If you can't give me any words that indicate what kind of crisis the UK is facing, while there's general agreement on 'Trump', 'tariffs', '(especially US) equities', 'the US dollar', 'global recession fears'... then I don't have time for your video recommendation.
tdeck 2y ago
It's interesting that this video is so focused on productivity since 2008, when a worker's income has been decoupled from productivity for decades.
Centigonal 2y ago
Some stats from this video: - The UK has one of the worst homelessness problems in Europe, with about 1 in 50 Londoners experiencing homelessness. - The UK economy stagnated for 10 years following 2008, resulting in a "lost decade" - The median disposable income in the UK was slightly lower than the US and Norway before the GFC by 6-8%, not it's 16-20% behind. IDK if I'd call this a crisis, i.e. people aren't rioting in the streets. That said, this is not the direction you want to be moving in as a developed country. The trend of people in formerly dominant countries electing leaders who keep making stupid own goals (increasing economic inequality, Brexit, gutting the NHS, gutting US foreign aid, tariff-pocalypse) is very worrying.
- card_zero 2y ago
  Ten times? More like two times: US population is around 340 000 000, 770 000 homeless. UK population is around 68 000 000, 354 000 homeless. (Possibly calculated more inclusively.) That's 0.23 % and 0.52 %. (Numbers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Kin... or more specifically from a govt department and a homelessness charity. The US figure "does not include those staying with friends or family because they do not have a place of their own".)

makeitdouble 2y ago

Reading the parent's comment I was expecting the UK GDP to have been plunging since Brexit, but that's not the case apparently[0]. Some sectors clearly profited from it, compensating for those who went down the drain. GDP isn't everything and from the outside the UK feel like in a very bad place, but I wonder what's the metric that really captures that status. Inequalities aren't getting that much wider as well. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/united-kingdom/gdp-gross-domestic-product https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...

bdelmas 2y ago
There is a lot of data to talk about that's why I linked the video directly in the other comment. Maybe check it out. For the GDP it may not look bad but compared to other countries and especially the US, the UK is going through what we call a "lost decade". Their GDP should be +25% higher than right now... That's just one (huge) metric talked about in the video.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Yup. Sadly, discussion of Brexit on HN is trash tier. Almost every claim about it you'll find here is completely wrong. Not in the sense of differing values or priorities, but in a "this is totally made up" kind of way. It's really concerning that so many people's understanding of the UK and Europe have suffered such a huge rupture with reality. The map is not the territory! Leaving the EU had no effect on the British economy. Not positive, not negative. Even the trade balance with the EU merely continued along its long term trend, so apparently the single market wasn't delivering any value in the end. The closest thing you can find to an economic impact was the currency dump that happened the moment the result was called, but the economy did fine in the post-referendum years and so those traders who panicked just took a bath and the currency recovered later. Not that a currency devaluation is such a bad thing for the UK anyway, its exports could use the help. Even some non-economic impacts failed to materialize, in both directions. The UK rejoined the Horizon research programme (supposedly a "cherry" that would be lost), but also the reduction in immigration that voters were promised didn't happen either, in fact immigration went into overdrive. A lot of people who support the EU don't realize any of this, partly because the news doesn't report on things that don't happen so they never hear about it. But mostly it's because they conflate predictions with reality. For example, there's someone saying in this thread that "the narrative was pretty catastrophic" followed by "I don't know how things panned out". And when I pointed out this lack of impact less than two weeks ago here, I got a reply that cited another pile of predictions as a refutation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43469356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43469356 It's a systemic problem that crops up in other areas too. During COVID modeling predictions were regularly repeated as if they'd already happened, and you see the same mental slippage in climate change discourse. The line between "we think this might happen", "this will happen" and "this has already happened" blurs to nothing.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 2y ago

Brexit was pretty bad for the UK proportional to the size of their population/economy, and is still causing problems even though the initial dislocation is over. If you think it's a lesser crisis, you could just say that. I haven't done the numbers to make an exact comparison, but they both have the qualities of being being abrupt, severe, and self-inflicted.

OJFord 2y ago
> If you think it's a lesser crisis, you could just say that. I do, but the principal reason I didn't say that is that I had no idea it's what the commenter I replied to was referring to. 'Brexit' feels mostly completely irrelevant / not a topic of concern or debate since at least the beginning of the pandemic five years ago. The vote was almost a decade ago. 'If bdelmas thinks it's like Brexit, they could just say that', to paraphrase your own comment.
- lazyasciiart 2y ago
  The vote didn’t implement anything. Britain didn’t actually leave the EU until 2020. Brexit is as of much concern in Britain, still, as Trump is - because it underlies their entire shaken economy. You think some tariffs are bad? Ok now what if Trump simultaneously tore up every trade agreement? And cancelled the visas of every European citizen in the country, who happened to make up 10% of the medical sector?
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago
    Oh, you’re actually British, how surprising. Perhaps it’s only still a topic among people who understood what was going to happen.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    Alright take 2020 then: year started $1.32/£, ended at 1.37. The world was shaken by SARS-nCoV-2019, but I do not remember us feeling particularly extra shaken by Brexit crisis. That is not really relevant anyway, the up-thread suggestion was that there was some current ongoing crisis more significant than anything happening in the US. That user didn't even mention Brexit, but if that is what they meant, no, I assure you it's predominantly Trump and tax year end stuff in our news.