FACTS, just facts. Like Charles Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind, many voters simply want some objective information on whether Britain would be better off in or out of the EU. The problem is that it is impossible to know the answer for sure, not least because we cannot know what kind of trade deal Britain would be able to strike. Any deal will involve trade-offs – between access to the single market and ability to control immigration, for example. We can’t know what deal the EU will offer and what a chastened government (its advice will have been rejected by the electorate) will agree to accept. That is one reason why the two campaigns will be swapping contrary statistics for the next three-and-a-bit months.
As a guide to the process, every investment bank, think-tank and fund manager worth its salt has indicated its views on the issues. The latest is the biggest fund manager in the world*, BlackRock, which said that
Our bottom line is that a Brexit offers a lot of risk with little obvious reward. We see an EU exit leading to lower UK growth and investment, and potentially higher unemployment and inflation. Any offsetting benefits look more amorphous and less certain, in our view.
Not everyone agrees with this, of course. So your blogger has attempted to sort through the morass and pick out the key arguments; to avoid War and Peace-length posts, this will take more than one blog. Of course, because of
Article source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2016/03/brexit-debate
