It's clear that the City will be impacted by this, but bear in mind that for the last five years the UK has been fighting to maintain it's place vs Paris and Frankfurt. The EU needs to implement a single fiscal authority to manage the Euro, that will not be based in London, there was never any prospect of that given London is not part of the Eurozone and the UK joining the Euro would destabilise the Euro, the UK economy and the wider european economy. London is inflated like a balloon at the moment, housing is utterly unaffordable and the transport system is totally disfunctional; I've been unable to get in for half of this week due to "floods" normally I can get a train into London with a travel time of 1hr 30min... my record time was/is 9hrs (all trains cancelled, hours waiting for busses, hours on buses, one of my colleagues got home less than an hour before having to leave to go back to work!)

In terms of positives here is a list.

1) People have woken up to the disastrous gap between rich and poor, realizing, I hope, that there is no communication between the provenances and the technocrats and that while you can bully and marginalize the poor you are simply unable to ignore them without resorting to repression. A vote like this is much better than a ring of estates where law breaks down and people are condemned to hopeless disassociation from the society that funds them. Now, will the UK's elite front up and start helping our fellow countryfolk? I doubt it, but that's the test on the table - create meaningful engagement in life and society for the bottom 25% rather than just hoping that they shut up and go away.

2) The EU can now reform its financial and governance arrangements to fit the needs of the Euro, if the EU doesn't do this the Euro is going to collapse, so I hope it does. This will make the EU more prosperous than it would otherwise be. Guesses please - the European state's GDP post a Euro collapse vs. the EU's GDP with a reformed and functioning single currency?

3. The UK will break up enabling Scotland to further develop its distinctive and hopefully very successful economy and national identity, in particular it will be interesting to see if this results in Edinburgh rebuilding itself as a financial centre as opposed to Frankfurt, Paris and London. If I were the SNP I would be planning a bloody great hub airport and some other very shiny infrastructure (high speed rail to Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester? Cross rail for Edinburgh/Glasgow?)

> there's very little London can do for Europe that can't be done just as easily in Frankfurt

The real winners here are probably going to be Hong Kong and Singapore. Those are top of mind alternatives when finance strategically places organizations in London, and with low tax and compatible legal systems (from what I understand Hong Kong's is pretty much a carbon copy of the UK) they basically got one competing city of the game.

> the blatant lies about immigration and sovereignty

The immigration nonsense disturbs me. Even if the UK leaves the EU, surely the freedom of movement will remain just as with the other non-EU European countries. Leaving won't make a difference. Plus with the commonwealth and all, the country is basically built on migrants. I hope that it influenced the vote only for a minority of people, and that the outside media image that this was important is just that, a stupid media image.

They're in the wrong time zone to compete...

I remember an issue in Cologne over new years. Economics isn't always the most important.

No, you don't. You remember reading about it on the equivalent of Fox news.

There were no mass rapes, gropings, etc.

Would you believe the papers if they said Jews were out in force, drinking the blood of your Christian babies?

Edit: Oh forgive me for pointing out the blood libel. What could ever go wrong from framing an entire ethnicity for stealing our jobs and raping our women?

I have no idea what your original comment is referring to, but from my perspective you just lost the game of "let's not appear completely insane in front of strangers."

That's an ineffective way of communicating your point.

The original poster is referring to an incident that happened in Cologne around new years; supposedly there was a "mass raping" (as some newspapers put it) which was soon blamed on the large amount of "fresh" immigrants in Cologne. As it turned out the "fresh" immigrants had, almost, nothing to do with it and most of the perpetrators were people who had stayed in Germany for an extended period of time already.

Although i get why the person above is frustrated with people spouting lies about immigrants their reaction is indeed not favourable to a healthy discussion :S

Bullshit.

On the order of 1000 women got assaulted. One person got sentenced thus far, to the best of my knowledge - and he is indeed a "fresh immigrant".

You have absolutely no basis for your claims.

There were about 2k incidents in total all across Germany, and 5 reported rapes. That's 0.25%.

That's 5 too many rapes, and 2k assaults (groping etc) too many, I've been molested before and it's obviously unacceptable. But it's also a far cry from rape, usually, like in my case.

Yet the media at times reported on this as if there were thousands of women getting raped in the streets. Those were blatant lies.

Some viewers and some sections of the (social) media, particularly online, also interpreted these alleged mass rapes as some kind of savagery that only a foreigner could engage in. Uncivilised barbarism only a muslim refugee could engage in. Yet every single year at Octoberfest, about 10 women report getting raped, and cases of sexual assault by drunk partygoers is orders of magnitude larger. Even outside of large festivities, about 20 women in Germany are raped every day, again, minorities have no monopoly on these criminal acts. Hell, for a brief example of the same city, Cologne, only a few months ago a reporter was sexually assaulted by white Germans who groped her, kissed her and made sexual remarks.

That's the point the guy was trying to make. Obviously none of this is acceptable, but immigrants or foreigners have no monopoly on criminal, unacceptable acts. The one or the other group may be overrepresented in crime figures, the data shows that, too. But the same data shows in study after study that when you control for things like age (young people commit more crimes), socioeconomic status (poor, unemployed people commit more crimes), gender (obvious) etc etc, ethnicity plays no role in crime. i.e. there's nothing inherent about an ethnicity or religion that programs people to such savage acts.

And this is obvious, we don't say these things about jews for example. But we used to, that's where the comment on jews drinking blood of babies comes from, because that's the silly rhetoric we used to spread, which led to widespread prosecution against them. Today we see, particularly on less sophisticated but all too popular social media, mistaken narratives about immigrants or foreigners or muslims or various other minorities, coming here to rape our women. That's a narrative we should reject because it's not true. It wasn't too long ago we somehow had a story of a 13 year old girl getting gang-raped by arabs for 30 hours, in the daily mail. Obviously that's a shitty paper, but it's also very well read. Turns out it was a complete fabrication, but who remembers that? But it's that exact narrative that leads people to unreasonable fear (there's enough of actual issues to be scared for, no need for unreasonable fears on top), fear that inspires things like this leave vote.

So did more than 1k women get assaulted? Yes, undoubtedly. Were there mass rapes? No. Are rapes and assaults by Germans a daily phenomenon, just like it is in every other place on the planet where people's rights are never 100% fully respected? Yes.

In short, it was horrible, but sometimes also blown out of proportion with bs rhetoric and blatant lies we don't need to have.

I am getting mixed signals from society.

One day looking at women is rape. The other day mobs assaulting women in a Taharrush is blowing things out of proportion.

Come on, don't be silly.

I won't even comment on the former, it's akin to a silly stereotype of the feminist movement you see on 4Chan.

Mobs assaulting women is not blowing things out of proportion, in and of itself. All of that deserves attention, none of that is acceptable, and I welcome these facts being presented.

But groping a woman and raping a woman are two different things, and you simply shouldn't report the former as the latter. If you do, you blow it out of proportion, there's nothing strange about this. Similarly there's a difference between punching a man and shooting a man, between stealing a pair of shoes and stealing a car. Just stick to the facts. 0.25% of incidents involving rape, is not mass rape. 5 reported rapes on NYE, while more than 20 are reported daily in Germany, and twice as much happen every year during Octoberfest, is not some new level of mass rape. If you don't report that honestly and blatantly lie about that (and other things, like e.g. a 13 year old getting gang-raped for 30 hours which never happened, but incited fear and hatred, which have led to increased hate crimes in the past year) then yes, you are blowing things out of proportion. That isn't a mixed signal.

>"fresh" immigrants had, almost, nothing to do with it and most of the perpetrators were people who had stayed in Germany for an extended period of time already.

Oh that's OK then.

The person I was replying to did. I can't help you if you refuse to research the topic.

Yeah, it looks like the potential political consequences to the EU are far more important than the trade ones. The possibility of more countries exiting just got a lot more realistic now.

1% of GDP tied to a single trading partner and a single industry is a pretty big deal. Likewise, 4% of GDP in finance commerce to Germany is a big deal.

Seems like good evidence that the parties will want to ensure trading continues mostly the same as it has been. A big question is whether the rest of the EU would be able to block such arrangements. I don't think they will either want to or be able to.

But the stickiness of geography for finance and autos are very different. Replicating a segment of London's financial sector in Frankfurt is easier than replicating BMW/VW to UK.

Cars are ultimate commodity - you can buy Lexus or BMW and they are mostly equivalent. I am sure Toyota or Honda will be happy to sell cars in UK. Import to UK from EU is almost 1.5x higher than reverse. Tariffs will cost EU more than UK.