Jay Doubleyou: european jokes about the british
Here's another:
Jay Doubleyou: brexit: and punctuation
So, why did the Brits vote for Brexit?
BBC Radio 4 - The Briefing Room, Why Did People Vote Leave?
We seem not to want to trust the 'expert any longer':
Futures Forum: The people's voice and expertise > How democracy is about respectful discussion, not just voting
.
Gove: Britons "Have Had Enough of Experts" - YouTube
Simply put, people are ignorant. The ignorance is underscored in Britain by lots of people scrambling after the vote to learn what this European Union business is all about. It is underscored in the United States by Trump declaring after one of his primary election victories, “I love the poorly educated.”
Brexit and the Transnational Triumph of Ignorance | The National Interest
This is the 'age of stupid':
Living in the Age of Stupid: How to comprehend Brexit, Trump and the Anti’s – The Risk-Monger
And the people are revolting against 'the expert':
What is happening in the United States has also been happening in the UK. The Brexit campaign had its own Trumpian moment, courtesy of Michael Gove, who told Faisal Islam in an interview on Sky News on 3 June that “the British people have had enough of experts”. Gove was also widely mocked – if not experts, who was he proposing to get to repair his car, fix his teeth, teach his kids?
But what he said struck a deep chord, because it contained a large element of truth. The experts Gove was deriding had been telling the British public that the risks of Brexit far outweighed any potential benefits. Gove insisted that the voters should decide this for themselves, on the basis of their own experiences, rather than listening to elite voices that had a vested interest in the outcome. Those voices came trailing educational qualifications, which had put them in their positions of authority – at the IMF, the Bank of England, the Treasury. Gove was asking voters lacking anything like the same educational qualifications to feel empowered to reject what they were being told. And in the referendum on 23 June, that is what they did.
...
Educated v less educated may be even more toxic than rich v poor, because it comes laden with assumptions of moral superiority. These days the rich find it quite hard to get away with the presumption that their wealth is proof of their virtue. When they seek protection from the system, it is pretty clear what they are up to: they are looking after their interests. But when the educated look out for themselves they can dress it up as something ostensibly better than that: expertise.
To those on the receiving end, that stinks. It stinks of hypocrisy, and it also stinks of self-interest. The fact that the educated are not always the beneficiaries of the social attitudes that they hold – Corbyn’s supporters, like Bernie Sanders’s, would rightly insist that many of the positions they adopt are designed for the benefit the socially excluded – does not help. It just makes them sound even more self-righteous.
The EU referendum was seen by educated optimists – including some of the people around David Cameron – as just another way for democracy to let off steam: a means of giving vent to anger without letting it run out of control. That is what the optimists have been saying about Trump too. But the steam is still rising.
To those on the receiving end, that stinks. It stinks of hypocrisy, and it also stinks of self-interest. The fact that the educated are not always the beneficiaries of the social attitudes that they hold – Corbyn’s supporters, like Bernie Sanders’s, would rightly insist that many of the positions they adopt are designed for the benefit the socially excluded – does not help. It just makes them sound even more self-righteous.
The EU referendum was seen by educated optimists – including some of the people around David Cameron – as just another way for democracy to let off steam: a means of giving vent to anger without letting it run out of control. That is what the optimists have been saying about Trump too. But the steam is still rising.
In the end, we want our politicians to be dumb:
A simple solution. This is an easy fix. No overhaul of the entire educational system is needed because dumb voters are not the key problem. The truth is, all voters are dumb about most foreign and domestic policy matters and they always have been. Who has time to learn all that stuff while working, raising children, and watching forty hours of TV per week? Fortunately, we don’t have to elevate the IQ of every American voter to solve this problem. All we need is a new awareness movement to sell the public on an old idea. Spread the word: Presidents should be smart and well informed.
Welcome to:
Idiocracy - Wikipedia
Idiocracy - Trailer - YouTube
So, much of the reason for voting for Brexit was about voting against the 'elite' - because people feel that the system isn't working:
Futures Forum: Is 'meritocracy' really all it's made out to be?
Futures Forum: How meritocracy and populism reinforce each other's faults
Or, perhaps this is a myth:
Futures Forum: Brexit: and the "myth of the left-behind":
Brexit: a coup by one set of public schoolboys against another
‘The traditional climax of a Union election was one Etonian backstabbing another for the presidency’
THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD OF, MAY EXPLAIN REES-MOGG LOVE OF HARD BREXIT
The driving theme of this book is the information revolution, ‘the most sweeping in history’, liberating individuals at the expense of the 20th century nation-state. Indeed, the authors argue that microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation state, creating new forms of social organisation in the process. It will be faster than any previous revolution, and not without pain.
The ‘Sovereign Individuals’ who will gain most from this liberation are ‘the brightest, most successful and ambitious’ among us, ‘those who can educate and motivate themselves …. Genius will be unleashed, freed from both the oppression of government and the drags of racial and ethnic prejudice.’
...
Of course Rees-Mogg Jr may not share every part of the Rees-Mogg Sr worldview. But we know from his own mouth that he shares much of it, and reading The Sovereign Individual, it is easy to see why he so loves Brexit, and the chaos and disorder, and opportunities for disaster capitalism and super-elitism, that it may provide. At least his father was honest in his depiction of that vision – the commercialisation of sovereignty, Bermuda in the sky with diamonds – as a good one for people of wealth who can put their assets wherever they like, so that taxes and inflation are for the ‘left-behinds’ not the Sovereign Individuals born to rule, but freed from all rules themselves. Lord Mogg would be very proud of his son’s role in trying to get Britain to the hardest Brexit of all, whatever the impact on the ‘left-behinds’ whose votes were just a necessary support on the journey, but whose needs will be forgotten as soon as the vision of Bermuda in the sky with diamonds is upon us.
The most important book you have never heard of, may explain Rees-Mogg love of hard Brexit | Alastair Campbell
Alastair Campbell: Resist Jacob Rees-Mogg’s vision of a brave new world | Latest Brexit news and top stories - The New EuropeanFutures Forum: Brexit: and leaving behind the left-behind
This is the true 'elite':
Wall Street’s 0.01%: The Guru Who Only Talks to Hedge-Fund Elite - Bloomberg
Elite men and inequality in the hedge fund industry – Work in Progress
10 Elite Hedge-Fund Managers Made a Jaw-Dropping $7.7 Billion in 2018
Finally, there's profit to be made from 'dislocation':
Why are hedge funds supporting Brexit?
Two billionaire ‘hedgies’, Crispin Odey and Michael Hintze, have backed the out campaigns in EU referendum
Hedge funds like the sort of stock market volatility predicted this week by a US investment bank: Morgan Stanley claimed that if the UK votes to leave the European Union, shares in the FTSE 100 could underperform by 20%. In the hedge fund industry based in London’s Mayfair, that prospect has profit potential.
Any drastic movement in the share prices of Britain’s biggest listed companies could be a trigger for hedge fund managers to perform a classic manoeuvre: making profits by betting on slumping share prices. Known as shorting, a fund borrows shares from a City investor who charges a fee for the service. The fund then sells the shares in the expectation of buying them back more cheaply when the price falls, and then returning them to their rightful owner. The difference between the two prices is pocketed as a profit by the hedge fund.
But the prospect of some profitable trading is not the key reason why many of those in the hedge fund business – led by billionaires Crispin Odey and Sir Michael Hintze – are backing Brexit.
Most of the big City firms and institutions – from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to the Lloyd’s of London insurance market and the City of London Corporation – believe Britain is better off staying in the EU. Leaving, they argue, would endanger the status of the City as Europe’s financial centre, and growth prospects across the wider economy.
But many of the Mayfair-based hedgies have no such worries and are backing Brexit with both words and cash. They have clear professional reasons why they want the UK to leave the EU: a dislike for what they regard as overburdensome – and profit-reducing – regulation.
According to one source close to the industry: “I think there’s a genuine conviction they have that all regulation is rubbish.” But, he says, the profit potential from leaving is also a factor: “They love taking a view ... Market dislocation is fine if you’re a hedge fund guy.”
Why are hedge funds supporting Brexit? | Business | The Guardian
For example, what about the leader of UKIP?
Why did Nigel Farage tell the world he thought remain had won?
Bloomberg raises important questions about whether Farage, a former commodities broker with many friends and backers in the financial sector, said remain had won with the intention of benefiting hedge funds who stood to gain from a sudden drop in the pound.
Farage told Bloomberg his concessions were not aimed at moving the markets for anyone, and told MailOnline that he did not try to mislead people by conceding defeat. But speculating on Brexit has made at least one very rich Brexiteer that bit richer. Crispin Odey was one of the largest donors to leave, handing over just shy of £900,000 to the campaign.
On hearing the referendum result, Odey said: “I feel fantastic. It’s a fantastic decision by the electorate.” Odey had a special reason to feel “fantastic”. He’d bet on Brexit hitting the pound by “shorting” sterling and moving 65% of his fund into gold in anticipation. Odey’s fund made £220m in the space of just a few hours. As he said at the time: “I think I may be the winner.”
Hedge funds make money by betting on economic events, and hit the big time during the turbulence caused by the 2008 financial crisis. EU policies designed to restore stability to financial markets, such as the 2012 short selling regulation , are anathema to this sort of investor. Odey has voiced his objection to tighter EU regulation of hedge funds and has claimed that new EU banking rules will contribute to a “terrifying” environment for “investors”, although a distinction between investors and gamblers might be helpful here.
Hedge funds, including the one run by Odey, made some big wins by betting on the damage Brexit would do to the pound and UK stock markets. Some of his hedge funds have since lost significant value, but if the UK actually leaves the EU, the ensuing volatility will create excellent conditions for them to roll their dice again. He’s already banking on Britain’s largest firms performing badly in the wake of Brexit. But such is financial engineering that you don’t even need to bet on something going in a particular direction – you can also bet that uncertainty itself will go up or down.
To understand the situation the UK has got itself into, it helps to know that Brexit isn’t simply an anti-elitist revolt. Rather, it is an anti-elitist revolt led by an elite — a coup by one set of public schoolboys against another.
I went to university with both sets, and with hindsight I watched Brexit in the making. When I arrived at Oxford in 1988, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove had just left the place. George Osborne and the future Brexiters Jacob Rees-Mogg and Daniel Hannan were all contemporaries of mine.
Futures Forum: Brexit: and democracy: "Ordinary voters never took much interest. Perhaps they didn’t care whether they were ruled by a faraway elite in Brussels or ditto in Westminster."
There are actually other 'elites' at work, as reported again by the Financial Times:
Tories raise cash and laughs, but Labour’s not smiling
The chance to play doubles tennis with David Cameron and Boris Johnson fetched £160,000 at this year’s Conservative summer fundraiser, where the dress code was “glamorous” and the venue was the home of polo.
Leading business people and City financiers mingled with cabinet ministers at the Hurlingham private members’ club in Fulham, west London, on Wednesday night for the Tory party’s penultimate fundraising event before next year’s general election.
Many of the guests arrived at the exclusive venue – the Hurlingham Club has a 20-year waiting list and set the rules of polo – in Rolls-Royces and Jaguars with blacked out windows in an effort to remain low-key.
Mr Cameron gave a speech to an audience containing some of Britain’s wealthiest business people and financiers. Sir Michael Hintze, the CQS hedge fund manager; Lord Fink, former party treasurer and grandee of the hedge fund industry; and James Lupton, party treasurer and former Barings banker, were among the dozens of industry figures at the party.
Hugo Swire, Foreign Office minister and one of the leading charity auctioneers, presided over the sales. When it came to the tennis lot, Mr Swire joked that the ball boys serving the prime minister and London mayor would be Lynton Crosby, the Tory campaign chief, and Andrew Feldman, the party’s co-chairman. “They will be picking up David’s balls and then give them to Nick Clegg, who hasn’t got any,” Mr Swire joked, according to one guest. Mr Swire also sold off a pot of his own honey, dubbing it a “most unusual, rare gift which only four people have got” – David and Samantha Cameron and George and Frances Osborne. “It is a jar of my own honey. . . It will be the most expensive jar of honey bought in the world.” His sweet talk paid off,with the honey said to have sold for double its £15,000 starting point.
Tories raise cash and laughs, but Labour’s not smiling - FT.com
PMQs: Corbyn blasts Tories 'in pockets of elite few' over £2.9m hedge fund donations - Mirror Online
Futures Forum: "Thanks to the hard work of people in East Devon and across Britain the economy is now above its pre-crisis peak"
And it's still happening, according to the Telegraph:
Inside the secret City battle for donors as Tory leadership hopefuls seek to rebuild party links with business
Mere minutes after Theresa May formally announced her resignation as prime minister last month, the inbox of one of Britain’s best-known investors pinged with an invitation on behalf of Boris Johnson.
Jon Moulton, the former Tory party donor and Brexit backer, was asked to breakfast with Johnson in the coming weeks. The race for the City’s support had begun.
“It was clearly ready and waiting,” says Moulton, who has already been invited to five breakfasts and one coffee with Conservative leadership hopefuls but has rejected them all. “So far I’ve been asked to six ‘do’s’ for three candidates, one who hasn’t even declared. Boris is most organised it seems. I really lack much enthusiasm for any...
Inside the secret City battle for donors as Tory leadership hopefuls seek to rebuild party links with business
Follow the money:
For two years, observers have speculated that the June, 2016, Brexit campaign in the U.K. served as a petri dish for Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign in the United States. Now there is new evidence that it did. Newly surfaced e-mails show that the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and Cambridge Analytica, the Big Data company that he worked for at the time, were simultaneously incubating both nationalist political movements in 2015.
Emma Briant, an academic expert on disinformation at George Washington University, has unearthed new e-mails that appear to reveal the earliest documented role played by Bannon in Brexit. The e-mails, which date back to October of 2015, show that Bannon, who was then the vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, an American firm largely owned by the U.S. hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, was in the loop on discussions taking place at the time between his company and the leaders of Leave.EU, a far-right nationalist organization. The following month, Leave.EU publicly launched a campaign aimed at convincing British voters to support a referendum in favor of exiting the European Union.
New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s Role in Brexit | The New Yorker
Futures Forum: Brexit: and new evidence emerging over the role of Cambridge Analytica > follow the money
But many Brits feel they can make it:
Futures Forum: Brexit: and the fleet-footed, clever trading nation
Including those who are pushing for a very different scenario of low tax - which the US is keen on:
The Beauty of Tax Competition: Will US Cuts Prompt Other Countries to Follow Suit? - Foundation for Economic Education
But the EU is not:
The Anti Tax Avoidance Directive - European Commission
I've seen how the EU tackles tax evasion versus the US – and if Brexit Britain follows Trump, we're headed for disaster | The Independent
From last month:
The Brexit undertones of the EU's impending anti tax avoidance legislation
And from last year:
At What Point Do We Admit Brexit Was About Tax Evasion?
There are actually other 'elites' at work, as reported again by the Financial Times:
Tories raise cash and laughs, but Labour’s not smiling
The chance to play doubles tennis with David Cameron and Boris Johnson fetched £160,000 at this year’s Conservative summer fundraiser, where the dress code was “glamorous” and the venue was the home of polo.
Leading business people and City financiers mingled with cabinet ministers at the Hurlingham private members’ club in Fulham, west London, on Wednesday night for the Tory party’s penultimate fundraising event before next year’s general election.
Many of the guests arrived at the exclusive venue – the Hurlingham Club has a 20-year waiting list and set the rules of polo – in Rolls-Royces and Jaguars with blacked out windows in an effort to remain low-key.
Mr Cameron gave a speech to an audience containing some of Britain’s wealthiest business people and financiers. Sir Michael Hintze, the CQS hedge fund manager; Lord Fink, former party treasurer and grandee of the hedge fund industry; and James Lupton, party treasurer and former Barings banker, were among the dozens of industry figures at the party.
Hugo Swire, Foreign Office minister and one of the leading charity auctioneers, presided over the sales. When it came to the tennis lot, Mr Swire joked that the ball boys serving the prime minister and London mayor would be Lynton Crosby, the Tory campaign chief, and Andrew Feldman, the party’s co-chairman. “They will be picking up David’s balls and then give them to Nick Clegg, who hasn’t got any,” Mr Swire joked, according to one guest. Mr Swire also sold off a pot of his own honey, dubbing it a “most unusual, rare gift which only four people have got” – David and Samantha Cameron and George and Frances Osborne. “It is a jar of my own honey. . . It will be the most expensive jar of honey bought in the world.” His sweet talk paid off,with the honey said to have sold for double its £15,000 starting point.
Tories raise cash and laughs, but Labour’s not smiling - FT.com
PMQs: Corbyn blasts Tories 'in pockets of elite few' over £2.9m hedge fund donations - Mirror Online
Futures Forum: "Thanks to the hard work of people in East Devon and across Britain the economy is now above its pre-crisis peak"
And it's still happening, according to the Telegraph:
Inside the secret City battle for donors as Tory leadership hopefuls seek to rebuild party links with business
Mere minutes after Theresa May formally announced her resignation as prime minister last month, the inbox of one of Britain’s best-known investors pinged with an invitation on behalf of Boris Johnson.
Jon Moulton, the former Tory party donor and Brexit backer, was asked to breakfast with Johnson in the coming weeks. The race for the City’s support had begun.
“It was clearly ready and waiting,” says Moulton, who has already been invited to five breakfasts and one coffee with Conservative leadership hopefuls but has rejected them all. “So far I’ve been asked to six ‘do’s’ for three candidates, one who hasn’t even declared. Boris is most organised it seems. I really lack much enthusiasm for any...
Inside the secret City battle for donors as Tory leadership hopefuls seek to rebuild party links with business
Follow the money:
For two years, observers have speculated that the June, 2016, Brexit campaign in the U.K. served as a petri dish for Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign in the United States. Now there is new evidence that it did. Newly surfaced e-mails show that the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and Cambridge Analytica, the Big Data company that he worked for at the time, were simultaneously incubating both nationalist political movements in 2015.
Emma Briant, an academic expert on disinformation at George Washington University, has unearthed new e-mails that appear to reveal the earliest documented role played by Bannon in Brexit. The e-mails, which date back to October of 2015, show that Bannon, who was then the vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, an American firm largely owned by the U.S. hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, was in the loop on discussions taking place at the time between his company and the leaders of Leave.EU, a far-right nationalist organization. The following month, Leave.EU publicly launched a campaign aimed at convincing British voters to support a referendum in favor of exiting the European Union.
New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s Role in Brexit | The New Yorker
Futures Forum: Brexit: and new evidence emerging over the role of Cambridge Analytica > follow the money
But many Brits feel they can make it:
Futures Forum: Brexit: and the fleet-footed, clever trading nation
Including those who are pushing for a very different scenario of low tax - which the US is keen on:
The Beauty of Tax Competition: Will US Cuts Prompt Other Countries to Follow Suit? - Foundation for Economic Education
But the EU is not:
The Anti Tax Avoidance Directive - European Commission
I've seen how the EU tackles tax evasion versus the US – and if Brexit Britain follows Trump, we're headed for disaster | The Independent
From last month:
The Brexit undertones of the EU's impending anti tax avoidance legislation
And from last year:
At What Point Do We Admit Brexit Was About Tax Evasion?
Back in 2015, Britain rejected plans announced by Brussels to combat ‘industrial-scale tax avoidance by the world’s biggest multinationals’.
Britain had built a corporate tax haven for multinationals that included slashing corporation tax from 28 per cent to 20 per cent — new favourable tax regimes for multinationals with offshore financing subsidiaries, and tax breaks for patent-owning companies. As a result, Britain saw a number of large corporations like Aon, Fiat Industrial, and Starbucks’ European operations set up headquarters in the UK with a small number of staff in order to take advantage of these tax laws …
The common tax regulations would have clamped down on offshoring and removed many of these elements of Britain’s competitive tax advantages over other EU member states. Then European Commissioner for Tax, Pierre Moscovici, stated that: ‘The current rules for corporate taxation no longer fit the modern context, as corporate tax planning has become more sophisticated and competitive forces between member states have increased, the tools for ensuring fair tax competition within the EU have reached their limits’.
Earlier in 2015, Conservative, UKIP and DUP MEPs also voted against EU plans to crack down on corporate tax dodging, by making companies report where they make their profits and pay taxes. The plan included a requirement for all member states to agree on a common EU position for the definition of tax havens and for coordinated penalties to be imposed upon countries or territories across the world that are uncooperative in tackling tax evasion.
Then just two weeks ago, the EU revealed that they were set to launch an investigation into a British Government scheme that could help multinational firms pay less tax. The EU believes that the special exemptions for multinationals in Britain do not comply with EU competition rules as they allow them to pay less tax than their domestic-only competitors. So with the release of the Paradise Papers last week, it is useful to examine the relationship that Britain has with tax avoiders and evaders and the UK’s stance on the EU clamp-down on tax dodging tactics.
The crux of the investigation centres around the UK’s ‘controlled foreign company’ (CFC) rules that George Osborne implemented in 2013. It allows a multinational company that resides in the UK to reduce its tax bill by moving some taxable income to an offshore subsidiary (or CFC)...
At What Point Do We Admit Brexit Was About Tax Evasion? | Shout Out UK
Britain had built a corporate tax haven for multinationals that included slashing corporation tax from 28 per cent to 20 per cent — new favourable tax regimes for multinationals with offshore financing subsidiaries, and tax breaks for patent-owning companies. As a result, Britain saw a number of large corporations like Aon, Fiat Industrial, and Starbucks’ European operations set up headquarters in the UK with a small number of staff in order to take advantage of these tax laws …
The common tax regulations would have clamped down on offshoring and removed many of these elements of Britain’s competitive tax advantages over other EU member states. Then European Commissioner for Tax, Pierre Moscovici, stated that: ‘The current rules for corporate taxation no longer fit the modern context, as corporate tax planning has become more sophisticated and competitive forces between member states have increased, the tools for ensuring fair tax competition within the EU have reached their limits’.
Earlier in 2015, Conservative, UKIP and DUP MEPs also voted against EU plans to crack down on corporate tax dodging, by making companies report where they make their profits and pay taxes. The plan included a requirement for all member states to agree on a common EU position for the definition of tax havens and for coordinated penalties to be imposed upon countries or territories across the world that are uncooperative in tackling tax evasion.
Then just two weeks ago, the EU revealed that they were set to launch an investigation into a British Government scheme that could help multinational firms pay less tax. The EU believes that the special exemptions for multinationals in Britain do not comply with EU competition rules as they allow them to pay less tax than their domestic-only competitors. So with the release of the Paradise Papers last week, it is useful to examine the relationship that Britain has with tax avoiders and evaders and the UK’s stance on the EU clamp-down on tax dodging tactics.
The crux of the investigation centres around the UK’s ‘controlled foreign company’ (CFC) rules that George Osborne implemented in 2013. It allows a multinational company that resides in the UK to reduce its tax bill by moving some taxable income to an offshore subsidiary (or CFC)...
At What Point Do We Admit Brexit Was About Tax Evasion? | Shout Out UK
And in particular we're talking about hedge-fund managers:
His father wrote a book back in 1997:
THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD OF, MAY EXPLAIN REES-MOGG LOVE OF HARD BREXIT
The driving theme of this book is the information revolution, ‘the most sweeping in history’, liberating individuals at the expense of the 20th century nation-state. Indeed, the authors argue that microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation state, creating new forms of social organisation in the process. It will be faster than any previous revolution, and not without pain.The ‘Sovereign Individuals’ who will gain most from this liberation are ‘the brightest, most successful and ambitious’ among us, ‘those who can educate and motivate themselves …. Genius will be unleashed, freed from both the oppression of government and the drags of racial and ethnic prejudice.’
...
Of course Rees-Mogg Jr may not share every part of the Rees-Mogg Sr worldview. But we know from his own mouth that he shares much of it, and reading The Sovereign Individual, it is easy to see why he so loves Brexit, and the chaos and disorder, and opportunities for disaster capitalism and super-elitism, that it may provide. At least his father was honest in his depiction of that vision – the commercialisation of sovereignty, Bermuda in the sky with diamonds – as a good one for people of wealth who can put their assets wherever they like, so that taxes and inflation are for the ‘left-behinds’ not the Sovereign Individuals born to rule, but freed from all rules themselves. Lord Mogg would be very proud of his son’s role in trying to get Britain to the hardest Brexit of all, whatever the impact on the ‘left-behinds’ whose votes were just a necessary support on the journey, but whose needs will be forgotten as soon as the vision of Bermuda in the sky with diamonds is upon us.
The most important book you have never heard of, may explain Rees-Mogg love of hard Brexit | Alastair Campbell
Alastair Campbell: Resist Jacob Rees-Mogg’s vision of a brave new world | Latest Brexit news and top stories - The New EuropeanFutures Forum: Brexit: and leaving behind the left-behind
This is the true 'elite':
Wall Street’s 0.01%: The Guru Who Only Talks to Hedge-Fund Elite - Bloomberg
Elite men and inequality in the hedge fund industry – Work in Progress
10 Elite Hedge-Fund Managers Made a Jaw-Dropping $7.7 Billion in 2018
Finally, there's profit to be made from 'dislocation':
Why are hedge funds supporting Brexit?
Two billionaire ‘hedgies’, Crispin Odey and Michael Hintze, have backed the out campaigns in EU referendum
Hedge funds like the sort of stock market volatility predicted this week by a US investment bank: Morgan Stanley claimed that if the UK votes to leave the European Union, shares in the FTSE 100 could underperform by 20%. In the hedge fund industry based in London’s Mayfair, that prospect has profit potential.
Any drastic movement in the share prices of Britain’s biggest listed companies could be a trigger for hedge fund managers to perform a classic manoeuvre: making profits by betting on slumping share prices. Known as shorting, a fund borrows shares from a City investor who charges a fee for the service. The fund then sells the shares in the expectation of buying them back more cheaply when the price falls, and then returning them to their rightful owner. The difference between the two prices is pocketed as a profit by the hedge fund.
But the prospect of some profitable trading is not the key reason why many of those in the hedge fund business – led by billionaires Crispin Odey and Sir Michael Hintze – are backing Brexit.
Most of the big City firms and institutions – from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to the Lloyd’s of London insurance market and the City of London Corporation – believe Britain is better off staying in the EU. Leaving, they argue, would endanger the status of the City as Europe’s financial centre, and growth prospects across the wider economy.
But many of the Mayfair-based hedgies have no such worries and are backing Brexit with both words and cash. They have clear professional reasons why they want the UK to leave the EU: a dislike for what they regard as overburdensome – and profit-reducing – regulation.
According to one source close to the industry: “I think there’s a genuine conviction they have that all regulation is rubbish.” But, he says, the profit potential from leaving is also a factor: “They love taking a view ... Market dislocation is fine if you’re a hedge fund guy.”
Why are hedge funds supporting Brexit? | Business | The Guardian
For example, what about the leader of UKIP?
Why did Nigel Farage tell the world he thought remain had won?
Bloomberg raises important questions about whether Farage, a former commodities broker with many friends and backers in the financial sector, said remain had won with the intention of benefiting hedge funds who stood to gain from a sudden drop in the pound.
Farage told Bloomberg his concessions were not aimed at moving the markets for anyone, and told MailOnline that he did not try to mislead people by conceding defeat. But speculating on Brexit has made at least one very rich Brexiteer that bit richer. Crispin Odey was one of the largest donors to leave, handing over just shy of £900,000 to the campaign.
On hearing the referendum result, Odey said: “I feel fantastic. It’s a fantastic decision by the electorate.” Odey had a special reason to feel “fantastic”. He’d bet on Brexit hitting the pound by “shorting” sterling and moving 65% of his fund into gold in anticipation. Odey’s fund made £220m in the space of just a few hours. As he said at the time: “I think I may be the winner.”
Hedge funds make money by betting on economic events, and hit the big time during the turbulence caused by the 2008 financial crisis. EU policies designed to restore stability to financial markets, such as the 2012 short selling regulation , are anathema to this sort of investor. Odey has voiced his objection to tighter EU regulation of hedge funds and has claimed that new EU banking rules will contribute to a “terrifying” environment for “investors”, although a distinction between investors and gamblers might be helpful here.
Hedge funds, including the one run by Odey, made some big wins by betting on the damage Brexit would do to the pound and UK stock markets. Some of his hedge funds have since lost significant value, but if the UK actually leaves the EU, the ensuing volatility will create excellent conditions for them to roll their dice again. He’s already banking on Britain’s largest firms performing badly in the wake of Brexit. But such is financial engineering that you don’t even need to bet on something going in a particular direction – you can also bet that uncertainty itself will go up or down.
Brexit Big Short: How Pollsters Helped Hedge Funds Beat the Crash - Bloomberg
The Big Brexit Short - YouTube
But perhaps these are not particularly 'clever' people...
Jay Doubleyou: 'I have met many people who earn way more than £30,000 and have literally no discernible skills, not even one.'
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The Big Brexit Short - YouTube
But perhaps these are not particularly 'clever' people...
Jay Doubleyou: 'I have met many people who earn way more than £30,000 and have literally no discernible skills, not even one.'
.
.
.
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