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Website Boasts Nigel Farage’s Hilarious Leaked ‘Plan’ For Leaving The EU

Website Boasts Nigel Farage’s Hilarious Leaked ‘Plan’ For Leaving The EU

When Nigel Farage said his Brexit campaign had made a “mistake” in promising that Britain’s National Health Service would have £350 million more every week if the “Leave” campaign won, British voters seemed to know almost immediately that they had been duped.

That morning, the pound plummeted to its lowest point in 35 years. #Regrexit campaigns emerged across the UK, calling for a second vote. In the week since, hate crimes have spiked. Boris Johnson exited stage see-you-never-again.

Now, one website claims to have gotten ahold of Nigel Farage’s plan to make everything right again in Britain. It’s a bit hard to read, though. See if you can figure it out:

http://thebrexitplan.com/

 

Photo: European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker welcomes Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, prior to a plenary session at the European Parliament on the outcome of the “Brexit” in Brussels, Belgium. REUTERS/Eric Vidal

Brexit Vote Sends New Shocks Through Financial Markets, Political Chaos Deepens

Brexit Vote Sends New Shocks Through Financial Markets, Political Chaos Deepens

By Kylie MacLellan and Anirban Nag

Britain’s decision to leave the European Union sent new shockwaves through financial markets on Monday, with the pound falling despite the country’s leaders’ attempts to ease political and economic turmoil unleashed by the move.

Finance minister George Osborne said the British economy was strong enough to cope with the volatility caused by Thursday’s referendum, the biggest blow since World War Two to the European goal of forging greater unity.

But sterling later sank to its lowest level against the U.S. currency for 31 years, continuing the fall that began last week when Britons confounded investors’ expectations by voting to end 43 years of EU membership.

This put the pound, and European bank shares, on course for their biggest two-day slides on record.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said uncertainties over the global economy had heightened and called for a “united, stable EU, and a stable, prosperous Britain”.

But with the ruling Conservatives looking for a new leader after Prime Minister David Cameron’s resignation on Friday and lawmakers from the opposition Labour party stepping up a rebellion against their leader, Britain sank deeper into political and economic chaos.

“There’s no political leadership in the UK right when markets need the reassurance of direction,” said Luke Hickmore of Aberdeen Asset Management, expressing the view of many in the City of London financial center.

Cameron has promised to stay on until October as a caretaker, although a committee responsible for running the Conservative leadership contest recommended a faster process that should be completed by early September.

His refusal to start formal moves immediately to pull the country out of the EU has prompted many European leaders to demand quicker action by Britain, the EU’s second largest economy after Germany, to leave the 28-country bloc.

“It should be implemented quickly. We cannot remain in an uncertain and indefinite situation,” French finance minister Michel Sapin said on France 2 television.

Guenther Oettinger, a German member of the EU’s executive European Commission, said Cameron and his party should not risk causing damage by waiting until October to act.

“Every day of uncertainty prevents investors from putting their funds into Britain, and also other European markets,” he told Deutschlandfunk radio.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel she had “neither a brake nor an accelerator” to control events.

Hoping to ensure Germany’s strong trade relationship with Britain continues, she has appeared to take a softer line than some European leaders. But she ruled out informal talks before London notifies the EU of its intention to leave under the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, which provides its constitutional basis.

Making clear the exit negotiations would not be easy, Volker Kauder, who leads Merkel’s conservatives in parliament, told ARD television: “There will be no special treatment, there will be no gifts.”

 

FINANCIAL MARKETS’ MISJUDGMENT

Financial markets misjudged the referendum, betting on the status quo despite abundant signs that the vote would be close.

When reality dawned, the reaction was brutal. Sterling fell as much as 11 percent against the dollar on Friday for its worst day in modern history, while $2.8 trillion was wiped off the value of world stocks — the biggest daily loss ever.

That trumped even the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy during the 2008 financial crisis and the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987, according to Standard & Poor’s Dow Jones Indices.

Osborne tried to ease investors’ concerns in his first public comments since the referendum. He said he was working closely with the Bank of England and officials in other leading economies for the sake of stability as Britain reshapes its relationship with the EU.

“Our economy is about as strong as it could be to confront the challenge our country now faces,” he told reporters. “It is inevitable after Thursday’s vote that Britain’s economy is going to have to adjust to the new situation we find ourselves in.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew also tried to restore calm, telling CNBC television it had been “an orderly impact so far” though he later added: “We have resilience built into our economy, but we’re not cut off from the world.”

Visiting Brussels, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said it was important that “nobody loses their head” as the EU and Britain deal with the fallout from the referendum.

 

“PENSIONS ARE SAFE”

The vote to leave the EU has increased the likelihood of Scotland holding a second referendum on independence. The first, two years ago, rejected independence but some voters opposed it on concerns this meant leaving the EU.

Boris Johnson, a leading proponent of a Brexit and likely contender to replace Cameron, praised Osborne for saying “some reassuring things to the markets”.

The former London mayor said it was now clear “people’s pensions are safe, the pound is stable, markets are stable. I think that is all very good news.”

But financial markets took a different view, with sterling sliding Monday, shedding more than 3 percent against the dollar to $1.3221

The yield on British 10-year government bonds fell below one percent for the first time due to investors betting that the Brexit vote would trigger a Bank of England interest rate cut aimed at steading the economy.

Many economists have cut economic growth forecasts for Britain, with Goldman Sachs expecting a mild recession within a year. But the risks affect economies far beyond Britain.

“Against the backdrop of globalization, it’s impossible for each country to talk about its own development discarding the world economic environment,” China’s Li told the World Economic Forum in the city of Tianjin.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe instructed his finance minister to watch currency markets “ever more closely” and take steps if necessary.

At the weekend, the policy chief of Abe’s LDP party held open the possibility of currency intervention to weaken the yen and temper “speculative, violent moves”.

 

DIVIDED PARTIES

The outcome of the referendum has revived talk in Scotland of a new vote on independence, two years after Scots rejected such a move. Stunned by Thursday’s vote, a sufficient number of people have signed a petition calling for a new referendum on Britain’s EU membership to force lawmakers to at least consider a debate on the issue.

The referendum has also revealed social as well as economic stresses in divided Britain.

Immigration was one of the main themes of the referendum campaign, alongside discontent with Britain’s political establishment in general and the Conservatives in particular. Many Brexit backers complained the EU had allowed uncontrolled numbers of migrants to arrive from eastern Europe.

Police said offensive leaflets targeting Poles had been distributed in Huntingdon, central England, and graffiti had been daubed on a Polish cultural center in central London on Sunday, three days after the vote.

According to a local newspaper, the Cambridge News, the leaflets said “Leave the EU/No more Polish vermin” in English and Polish.

The Polish embassy in London said it was shocked by the “xenophobic abuse” aimed at the Polish community and others.

With Britain now facing uncertainty over how its trade relationship with the EU will unfold, Johnson tried to calm fears by writing in the Daily Telegraph newspaper that there would be continued free trade and access to the single market.

He suggested Britain would not have to accept free movement of workers, saying it could implement an immigration policy which suited business and industry.

However, single market rules stipulate that countries must accept the free movement of people as well as goods. Yielding on immigration would anger many Britons who voted to leave.

Johnson is expected to declare soon that he is running to lead the Conservatives, who have been divided for decades between pro- and anti-EU factions.

Divisions within the opposition are also deep. A wave of Labour lawmakers resigned from leader Jeremy Corbyn’s team on Monday, adding to the 11 senior figures who quit on Sunday.

They say Corbyn, a left-winger who has strong support among ordinary party members, is not fit to lead the party and point to his low-key campaign to keep Britain in the EU.

If repeated at the next parliamentary election, due in 2020, they fear Labour faces disaster following its near wiping out in Scotland last year. Corbyn has said he is going nowhere.

 

(Additional reporting by David Lawder, William James, Jamie McGeever, Nigel Stephenson, Kevin Yao, Costas Pitas, Bate Felix, Andrea Shalal, Michael Holden, Guy Faulconbridge, David Milliken, Patrick Graham, Anirban Nag, Michelle Martin, Paul Carrel, Conor Humphries, Minami Funakoshi and Tetsushi Kajimoto, Writing by David Stamp, Editing by Timothy Heritage)

Photo: Workers walk in the rain at the Canary Wharf business district in London, Britain November 11, 2013. REUTERS/Eddie Keogh/File Photo

Surprise Brexit Vote Unleashes Scramble For Dollars

Surprise Brexit Vote Unleashes Scramble For Dollars

Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union sparked traders on Friday to scramble for dollars in an effort to buy U.S. bonds and to exit dollar-based bets based on U.K. voters favoring to stay in the bloc.

The dash for greenbacks drove up the cost for Wall Street to fund its dollar-based trades to the highest in nearly three months.

The stunning outcome in Thursday’s Brexit referendum increased reluctance among money market funds and other cash investors to lend as global stock markets plunged.

“The front end of the market had been illiquid,” Tom Simons, money market strategist at Jefferies & Co in New York said of reduced lending with the looming end of the second quarter. “Now it’s a lot worse.”

The U.S. Federal Reserve and other major central banks on Friday sought to assure investors by saying they are prepared to provide dollars through existing liquidity arrangements.

The interest rate in the $3.8 trillion repurchase agreement market, where traders raise short-term cash from investors by pledging securities as collateral, was last bid at 0.80 percent, which was the highest since 0.85 percent on March 31, according to ICAP.

The overnight repo rate was quoted above 1 percent earlier Friday before retreating.

On Thursday, before the surprise outcome of the U.K. referendum, the repo rate ended at 0.60 percent.

“The funding pressure today was a panic in the repo market – the perception of a lack of liquidity,” Wedbush Securities managing director Scott Skrym wrote in a research note.

The scramble for traders to borrow dollars was also seen in the currency market.

The cost premium on three-month cross-currency swap contracts, measured by the three-month London interbank offered rate on dollars over the three-month rate on euros , was quoted about minus 46 basis points on Friday, ICAP data showed.

This was the steepest premium for players to exchange euro-denominated payments for dollar-pegged payments since early December.

Banks and hedge funds use these swaps for currency bets, while U.S. companies use them to hedge their non-dollar denominated bonds.

Three-month dollar Libor fell 1.65 basis points to 0.6236 percent, its lowest since March 17, while its euro counterpart slipped to minus 0.29500 percent, a record low.

Friday’s spike in dollar funding costs in the aftermath of the Brexit vote raised eyebrows but was not yet alarming, analysts said.

On Friday, investors trimmed their holdings of the Fed’s fixed-rate reverse repos, which have been used as a safe-haven asset in times of market turbulence.

 

Reporting by Richard Leong in New York and Anirban Nag in London; Editing by Chris Reese and Alan Crosby.

Photo: United States one dollar bills are seen on a light table at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington November 14, 2014. REUTERS/Gary Cameron/File Photo

No Union, No Pound, British Official Warns Scots Backing Independence

No Union, No Pound, British Official Warns Scots Backing Independence

By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times

LONDON — Escalating the fight against secession, the British government warned Thursday that Scotland would lose the right to continue using the pound as its currency if voters there say yes to a historic referendum on independence this fall.

“The pound isn’t an asset to be divided up between two countries after a breakup as if it were a CD collection,” Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said. “The people of the rest of the U.K. (United Kingdom) wouldn’t accept it, and Parliament wouldn’t pass it. … If Scotland walks away from the U.K., it walks away from the pound.”

Osborne’s stark warning, delivered in a speech in Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, represented a new willingness by unionists to take a hard line in persuading Scottish voters to shun independence in a September plebiscite. A thumbs-up would end Scotland’s 307-year-old marriage to England and Wales and cause the biggest political shakeup in the British Isles since Ireland split from the British crown nearly a century ago.

Scottish nationalists have insisted that their country, if independent, would retain the pound and other symbols of British identity, such as the monarchy. But Osborne, Britain’s top Treasury official, who had previously hinted at the difficulties of sharing a currency, said he now ruled out such an option.

In a reflection of the high stakes involved, Osborne, a Conservative, was immediately backed by his counterparts in the opposition Labour Party and in the Liberal Democrat party, the junior partner in Britain’s coalition government. The unusual show of unity was intended to put Scots on notice that, no matter which of the parties holds power in London after a general election next year, none will support the use of the pound by Scotland if it secedes.

Advocates of independence dismissed Osborne’s warning as an empty threat, evidence of a panicky effort by opponents to sow fear and bully Scottish voters into voting no.

Nicola Sturgeon, deputy first minister of Scotland’s semiautonomous government and a member of the Scottish National Party, said a currency union would be in the best interests of people on both sides of the border, given the volume of trade across it.

“If there was to be a different currency between England and Scotland, that would cost English businesses hundreds of millions of pounds in transaction costs,” Sturgeon told the BBC. Without Scottish exports of North Sea oil, “it would blow a massive hole in the balance of payments of the U.K.”

Sturgeon predicted that “what the Treasury says now in the heat of the campaign would be very different to what they say after a democratic vote for independence, when common sense would trump the campaign rhetoric.”

Her boss, First Minister Alex Salmond, has played hardball by suggesting that, if Scotland were shut out from the pound, it would renege on its share of the British government’s debts. Critics warn that such a move would doom Scotland’s credibility in global financial markets just as the newborn nation tried to stand on its own.

The shift to a more aggressive tone in the public debate over independence comes as some polls show a narrowing of the gap between the two sides.

Still, with just seven months to go before one of the most momentous votes in British history, the unionist camp remains firmly in the lead. In modern times, no poll has ever shown a majority of Scots in favor of separating from the rest of Britain.

Those campaigning to keep Scotland within the fold have apparently decided it best to appeal to both hearts and minds. In contrast to Osborne’s hard-nosed comments on currency matters, Prime Minister David Cameron pleaded last week with Scots to keep their marriage to the English and Welsh intact, noting their shared history, achievements and values in an emotional speech described by pundits as “love-bombing.”

The British pound is itself an emotive issue. Attachment to it among many Scots, along with the debt crisis afflicting continental Europe, has forced Salmond’s party to ditch its previous flirtation with adopting the euro or establishing a new currency.

Osborne cited the euro as an object lesson in the perils of a currency union, pointing out that eurozone countries have had to surrender more and more authority to Brussels over their national spending decisions in order to make the single currency work. Likewise, Osborne and others say, Scotland would enjoy a shabby sort of independence if it kept the pound, with its currency controlled by another nation and its fiscal policy constrained.

That argument was bolstered last month by the impartial governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, a Canadian, who said that “some ceding of national sovereignty” would be necessary for Scotland to keep the pound.

Osborne brushed off the Scottish National Party’s contention that “common sense” would ultimately lead the British government to continue circulating pounds north of the border if Scotland went its own way.

“Common sense is when you’ve got something that works really well already,” Osborne said. “You don’t throw it away. You don’t replace it with something that won’t work as well. And you certainly don’t embark on a high-risk experiment that may not work at all.”

Photo via wikimedia commons