The Great British Depression: Come On Down! [update]

It's just past 8 am EDT, and the most thrilling carnival ride in years is about to start.

How much will you bid on a market basket of UK exports? Same as yesterday? 1% more? 50% less? "Should I stay, or should I go??" The last pollster prediction was too close to call. The bookies make it Remain by a neck.

Financial markets are on a knife's edge ahead of Thursday's Brexit referendum, but investors will have to wait longer than usual to get the result of the vote.

Unlike normal general elections there won't be any exit polls at 10 p.m. London time, or 5 p.m. Eastern Time, when the voting stations close, so anyone nervously waiting for the outcome will have to stay awake and watch for local results to trickle out overnight.
-- here

That's too bad!! If the UK polling stations closed at American 8 pm, we'd have Mr. Market all in a tizzy for the last hour. Oh, the joy of it. OTOH, there will be leaks of exit data all day long, so we just might have the start of The Great British Depression today. All those .1%-ers pining for massive deflation will get their wish. They'll be able to buy a new Rolls at half price.

In the absence of exit polls, hedge funds and investment banks have commissioned private surveys to give them a head start on trading, according to U.K. media. That means financial markets could start to react to the referendum before any official results have been announced.

Cute. Even public voting has been privatized.

[update]
We see the triumph of nativism over intelligence. What a shock it will be to the Brits when they discover that financial services they've ridden all goes away. The City exploded when the UK went EU, not the other way round. They've bitten off their nose to spite their face. See, fiduciary capital is naturally stateless, and there's nothing of substance holding it in the City. You just need computers, servers, desks, and office space to hold same. With cloud-y computing all the rage, the City work will pop up in Paris and Berlin and Rome and such, since the servers need not be co-located, anyway.

Hopefully, the ramifications will become clear before the USofA gets to choose between nativism and intelligence.


We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
-- Ben Franklin