[Closed] EU Referendum - are you in or out?

Would the BoE put interest rates up after a Brexit to encourage people back to the currency?

I thought they were targeted with 2% inflation, so if the £ falls post Brexit (as it would) and imports go up, so will inflation, so they will have to up Interest Rates to keep inflation about 2%.

This argument that FPTP is undemocratic is baloney, it relies on the false premise that parties and voters would operate in the same way in a proportional system

Its hard to argue a system where not all votes count is fairer than a system where all votes do count

I do agree FPTP is not without strengths but being "More democratic" is not one of them.

head says out

Wot? Most people have it the other way round!

Out is emotive and sentimental, in is pragmatic.

But all votes count in both systems hence they are democratic - FTFP gives a less proportional result, but that is hardly a surprise considering the name of the alternative.

It's funny how people consider 'democratic' to be a synonym for a wide range of other positive concepts. It's really not, it's quite a specific definition.

But let's not derail the thread.

I also think it's a joke that the deadline to register has been extended until midnight Thursday. Everyone knew the deadline was coming and yet they extended it. I am amazed the electoral commission has agreed to it.

It's cos the server crashed before the deadline.

But anyway - why cut people off? This isn't about registering to vote, it's about voting. The deadline should be as close as possible to the day - they've just found a way to make it closer. This cannot be a bad thing.

mol +1

I thought they were targeted with 2% inflation, so if the £ falls post Brexit (as it would) and imports go up, so will inflation, so they will have to up Interest Rates to keep inflation about 2%.

Price of imports, but OK

Indeed, but BoE also have a mandate to ensure financial stability. If interest rates go up, the large exposures in the mortgage market will be exposed raising the risks to the banking sector and financial stability

But....

...on the positive side, higher inflation will gradually erode the level of outstanding debt and be good for savers.

Swings and roundabouts, swings and roundabouts.... 😉

on the positive side, higher inflation will gradually erode the level of outstanding debt and be good for savers.

.. borrowers, surely?

However a drop in the £ is also good for exports.

And just think how good it will be for domestic food manufacturers - milk, beef etc. not to be undercut by foreign imports.

and just think how bad it will be for farmers once the EU-funded single-farm payments are stopped.

has anyone on the 'out' side suggested an alternative method to subsidise farmers?

Not sure it's that simple. If £ fell a lot of our food would become expensive. Stuff we depend on.

sorry, sloppy writing

meant to say 😳

Higher inflation will gradually erode the level of outstanding debt; and higher interest rates would be good for savers...

It would be good for exports true (but not in the ST - classic J curve effect)

Swings and roundabouts....

Dont worry about the complexities - just blame the EU and nasty foreigners - its much easier

[I]has anyone on the 'out' side suggested an alternative method to subsidise farmers? [/I]

Nor the costs of doing so, since Scotland has so far spent £187m on systems so far to (not) pay out the EU money - wonder how much England&Wales spent?

http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/649187/Fiasco-British-EU-Farm-subsidies-scheme-could-cost-taxpayer-millions

A lot..., and this is the kinda cost we'll have to find after Brexit to replace current systems.

But all votes count in both systems hence they are democratic

Higher inflation erodes savings and negatively impacts savers because real interest rates are usually negative during periods of high inflation. In the 70s savers saw their savings eroded, then came Thatcher, monetarism and for a while interest rates were higher than inflation.

None of this matters if people just stop for a minute, look at Gove, Johnson and Farrage and think for a minute, in a post referendum power vacuum, am I going to hand it to these smug gits?

I think that is what most people will base their decision on.

Only the votes for winners in FPTP count all others votes result in no representation. UKIP or Greens - up until carswell and Brighton were an excellent example of this.

Remainers are so desperate now they are changing the law ! Registration deadline is to be revised. This is a clear sign they know that they stand on the losing side right now.

Isn't it a simple case of this will allow more people to vote? You could argue that by adjusting a deadline on it will always favour one camp or another. I don't know how you can be SURE of which camp it favours though.

None of this matters if people just stop for a minute, look at Gove, Johnson and Farrage and think for a minute, in a post referendum power vacuum, am I going to hand it to these smug gits?

Nonsense, Jeremy Corbyn is going to ride in on a wave of popularity and spirit of the revolution.

Must be true, I read it on Facebook.

Higher inflation erodes savings and negatively impacts savers because real interest rates are usually negative during periods of high inflation.

Sometimes, sometimes not.

At the moment we have negative real rates, no inflation and highly distorted asset prices with no sensible reference rate - in so-called free markets!!

Bloody mess.

and just think how bad it will be for farmers once the EU-funded single-farm payments are stopped.

My mum spent twenty years in the intervention board, tales she could tell... It's a **** argument, since, as you already know, we pay in more than we take out, so could happily continue the existing system if we wanted.

Not sure it's that simple. If £ fell a lot of our food would become expensive. Stuff we depend on.

Horse meat, crate reared pork, greenhouse tomatoes and winter strawberries?

teamhurtmore - Member
Higher inflation erodes savings and negatively impacts savers because real interest rates are usually negative during periods of high inflation.
Sometimes, sometimes not.

At the moment we have negative real rates, no inflation and highly distorted asset prices with no sensible reference rate - in so-called free markets!!

Bloody mess.

ps I never replied but i did read that link you posted, well the intro, scanned the doc, it was essentially just naysaying the other side? Not particularly what I was after.

If by "highly distorted asset prices" you mean that there has been house price inflation then you'll know that the government has been lying about inflation (governments usually do) and there has been high inflation so interest rates have been lower than inflation. If there really is no inflation then the only way to get "negative real rates" is to have negative interest rates full stop - you pay the bank to keep your money. The Uk isn't there yet though Germany is.

Not I appreciate that, but I still though it was worth a read. If not for the argument or the numbers, then for the context which is sadly missing from much of the debate.

As it says its very simple: balance the benefits to trade and investment against the obligations of membership and then (vote IN) decide

On the plus side it keeps extremist nutters away from influence. Its not without its advantages or strengths I agree

 

[i]and highly distorted asset prices with no sensible reference rate [/i]

THM just can't help himself sometimes! 🙂

Its important - after all pre the last crash, the powers that be flooded the market with liquidity at a time of low interest rates and then wondered why banks did silly things with it!!!

And now your pension is being invested in assets that are giving you a loss be [s]default, oops[/s] design.

You could make it up

It is not a failure of comprehension, you think a more proportional system equals greater democracy, I think you misunderstand what democracy means as a word. My more precise usage is in line with how the EIU and Freedom House calculate their Democracy Indices which do not mark down a country for having an FPTP system as opposed to a PR system - UK and Germany get same mark for plurality from EIU.

TMH time will tell which of us is right about the eurozone bailout, they don't have the firepower to bail themselves out not least as Spain and Italy are two of the offenders. The €350bn the Greeks have been gifted is a sideshow in comparison.

BTW I think the Remain campaign sought to head off discussion on the issue by publishing the "capital outflow" figures when they did. As a Remain economist said on Sky today this country runs a huge surplus in terms of fx flows, its the nature of our markets and our position in world trade. Trying to imply we've have £70bn of cash leave that would have otherwise been invested in the UK is a deliberate misrepresentation

then wondered why banks did silly things with

Typical lack of planning. No issue with low interest rates but regulations needed to be checked against the new environment. IMO the issue (to the extent their is one) had more to do with increasing bank deregulation and model based capital allocation than low interest rates.

I wonder how much thought has been given to stress testing government debt levels for a more normal interest rate environment? We seem to understand that's an intelligent thing to do for mortgages now.

Would the BoE put interest rates up after a Brexit to encourage people back to the currency?

On the deadline extension Gove is not going to say anything else publically other than be supportive not least as to do otherwise would sound defeatist so close to the vote.

head says out
Wot? Most people have it the other way round!

Out is emotive and sentimental, in is pragmatic.

Not for me it isn't...

This is what I think of George Osbourne's "no euro bailout guaranty". They cannot afford for us to sit it out and when their whole project reaches the precipice as it will do before 2020 we will have to pay up.

[img] [/img]

Yes, because the EU are just the same as the Nazis. We heard it the first time in Boris's article, thanks.

Cynic in me ponders how 1/2million suddenly decide to register just before the deadline.

@hora yes indeed, maybe the conspiracy theorists will say it's a vote Leaver 'bot crashing the site on purpose.

One other analogy for you. Voting Remain for Economic reasons is like a Turkey voting for Christmas as all it can see is the next bowl of grain

molgrips - Member

But anyway - why cut people off?

Because all the leave voters have already registered, and the extension is all a remain scam. Apparently.

mefty - Member

This argument that FPTP is undemocratic is baloney, it relies on the false premise that parties and voters would operate in the same way in a proportional system.

1) No it isn't and
2) No it doesn't.

You can't extrapolate votes directly from FPTP results to PR or AV results but that's a totally unconnected point. (also, generally FPTP suppresses the votes for "pointless" parties so it's a reasonable assumption that those parties underrepresented by FPTP's unproportional and therefore undemocratic nature would gain votes, not lose them)

Give me a defence for the fact that 3.8 million UKIP voters get 1 MP and 1.4 million SNP votes get 56. Or for that matter that 36.9% of votes cast gets a majority government, while 30.4% of votes gets roughly 1/3d less MPs. Democracy is defined as a system where all eligible people are involved in making the decisions that run a state, and that's not what you have while millions of votes count for nothing, millions of votes have many times more influence than others, and a minority are a majority- where the electoral system by design removes many people from that decision making process entirely.

Give me a defence for the fact that 3.8 million UKIP voters get 1 MP and 1.4 million SNP votes get 56.

UKIPs problem is that it doesn't have concentrated support, it's restricted to picking up all the loonballs and disaffected spread over a wide area.

There's a few ways of looking at democracy imo.

As for a defense of why 36% gets a majority government, well thats easy, it's a case of how do you think/want your democracy to work, will it be able to work constructively as coalitions? or is that counter productive? or is it better to have a system of majority rules? So then government can get on with a specific stated job with out interference etc.

There's valid arguments for PR and FPTP. Tbh with the scottish elections, I have issues and concerns with PR aswell.

seosamh77 - Member

well thats pretty simple, it to do with the fact that scotland has always been treated a somewhat different

Not really. But OK, repeat the same question with UKIP and the Lib Dems instead. 2.4 million Lib Dem voters gain 8 seats, 3.8 million UKIP voters get 1.

Or the Tories. UKIP received slightly more than 1/3d as many votes as the Tories, and got 1/303rd as many seats.

This isn't a regional matter. It's simply that our system invalidates most people's votes. (I'm using the SNP mostly because I'm an SNP voter; we're the big beneficiary of this parody of democracy, and I still think it sucks donkey balls. Ironically, so does our party leader)

I disagree, my reasons are stated above. 🙂

TMH time will tell which of us is right about the eurozone bailout, they don't have the firepower to bail themselves out not least as Spain and Italy are two of the offenders. The €350bn the Greeks have been gifted is a sideshow in comparison.

It will indeed. In the meantime, we can only be honest and stick to the facts as they exist - the history and the current ie, we have no exposure to any EZ emergency measure.

BTW I think the Remain campaign sought to head off discussion on the issue by publishing the "capital outflow" figures when they did. As a Remain economist said on Sky today this country runs a huge surplus in terms of fx flows, its the nature of our markets and our position in world trade. Trying to imply we've have £70bn of cash leave that would have otherwise been invested in the UK is a deliberate misrepresentation

Odd then that is was the OUT Torygraph than sensationalised the story and the IN FT that played it straight. Not much os a conspiracy - but you are right the eurosceptic Torygraph did mispresent what happened.

That being said - yes it was not a capital outflow, but is was a shift out of sterling. Wonder why - how are the polls doing???

On the deadline extension Gove is not going to say anything else publically other than be supportive not least as to do otherwise would sound defeatist so close to the vote.

ok, i have long assumed that you should not believe what Gove said, but for an OUTer to be so explicit that he is not to be trusted is quite something. But on this point, you are correct - he is full of shit (on Brexit at least) 😉

Buy on the rumour sell on the news.

Looking at a [url= http://www.onvista.de/devisen/Euro-Pfund-EUR-GBP ]10-year chart[/url] the prospect of a Brexit hasn't had much impact on the pound. You can interpret that as saying the markets think there won't be a Brexit or that the markets reckon a Brexit won't have much impact on sterling.

Why would the impact of Brexit affect the pound over the past 10 years?

Seems so prophetic really, Osbourne and Cameron - "we are not in the euro so we will not contribute to any bailout".

[i]Out of the aeroplane stepped [s]Chamberlain[/s] Cameron and Osbourne with a condemned man's stare
[b]But we all cheered wildly, a photograph was taken,
as he waved a piece of paper in the air[/b]
Now the Disco Machine lives in Munich and we are all friends
And I slip on my Italian dancing shoes as the evening descends

And the bells take their toll once again in victory chime
And we can thank God that we've finally got
Peace in our time[/i]

I still think it sucks donkey balls. Ironically, so does our party leader

At least Cameron waited until the pig was dead!