things: Another memory is of a senior civil servant saying to me during the disastrous monetarist period of early Thatcherism Ministers do crazy things my job is to see that they do crazy things properly or words to that effect . How, for goodness sake, can Whitehall officials, with the best will in the world, make this crazy no-deal scenario work properly Treasury officials have not been the flavour of the year with a government apparently dead set on heading for the Brexit cliff, according to The Guardian. Why Because they have been warning of the catastrophic consequences of no deal not to say of the somewhat less catastrophic consequences of any Brexit deal hard, soft or in-between. It was on something like those lines that a few of us wrote a parody of a Financial Times leading article many years ago on a very slow news day, when I was working for the FT. There haven't been many slow news days since the June 2016 referendum; but the memory of that FT parody has come back to me in the light of the elevation to prime minister of the at the time of writing United Kingdom of you know who. Recently, the Office for Budget Responsibility OBR has added to the warnings. In which latter context, it is worth emphasising that the uncertainty that followed the referendum and the huge hit to business confidence has meant that the traditional boost to investment and exports and import saving from a devaluation has been conspicuous by its absence. Even on the International Monetary Fund's less pessimistic no-deal Brexit scenario, the OBR sees damaging consequences for household incomes, the public finances and the pound.
(news.financializer.com). As
reported in the news.
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