I agree. We could make it more complex (much, much more complex) and, in the long term, reality will certainly be more complex. But the divorce bill does seem to be a serious blockage in the here-and-now. We will have to find the money on a timescale of years or perhaps a decade or three, depending on how we see national debt progressing. So I was curious to know if, by simply walking away under WTO rules, we’d have saved ourselves money that we could actually quite easily have afforded, or whether the bill is going to be a burden for sixty years like the post-WWII loan repayments to the US Anglo-American loan - Wikipedia.
The comments are hilarious but I’ve spent lots of time in Frankfurt and so have great difficulty believing that GS will move there, despite the presence of the ECB etc. It is just not sufficiently cosmopolitan (for want of a better word0.
I can believe that they’ll move to the EU though, because they will be incentivised to do so. Lloyd is more likely to be signalling for one of the major EU countries/cities to pony up the tax breaks and a nice comfy hi-tech office building. Frankfurt/Germany will be welcome to bid…an unmarked brown paper bag full of cash would be nice too.
It’s interesting (and perhaps not surprising) that the Barnier-Davis discussions are totally irrelevant, and things have to be dealt with by the premiers. Considering how ambitious both men are, they must be gutted.
That’s me striking GS off my mothers investments. They already have offices all over Europe, blatent propaganda. How many US billions were pumped into GS to stop people like this muppet going bust?
$25Billion prop up by US Gov’t apparently. Well run organisation then…
If they fail to get a deal we end up on the bones of our ass dependent on WTO tarrifs for trade, nothing for Services and with whole swathes of the UK economy cut to ribbons.
Moving to WTO rules is a move to protectionism. It has nothing to do with liberalising our trade. WTO rules will last many years as FTAs take an enormous period of time to negotiate. Multilateral agreements are an order of magnitude more tedious and drawn out. The Uruguay Round of GATT (preceded WTO) was 1986-94! The third WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle, 1999, was intended to start the Millennium Round of negotiations. We will be on WTO rules for at least a decade and probably more like a generation.
Essentially no trade deal means our export market (the EU) collapses and the marginal hill farmers in Cumbria, Wales and the Peak District go to the wall, land prices collapse, communities decimated.
