Financial Times’s Alex Barker: “It is a moment all EU leaders feared: a referendum jolt with the potential to fracture not just the union but reshape the postwar order in the west. Brexit tugs at the bonds holding the bloc together, and the collective standing and clout of its members in the world. The EU is at bay. Once Britain leaves, the EU loses its biggest military spender, a UN Security Council seat, its second-biggest economy and one of its most vocal champions of world trade and liberal economics. All that comes as the continent is buffeted by the aftermath of multiple economic and political shocks at home and abroad.”
Council on Foreign Relations’s Robert Kahn : “The fallout from the Brexit vote in the United States–tighter financial conditions caused by weaker stock markets and reduced risk taking, uncertainty about the future of Europe and global trade, as well as a weaker outlook for growth, strengthens the case for the Fed to put off rate hikes (if they needed any reason beforehand). Many issues that have come to the fore in our election campaign, including anxiety about the economic future of the country and globalization, will get a new look today. Together, there are many reasons to believe the economic consequences for the United States could be significant.”
New York Times’s Roger Cohen: “Warnings about the dire consequences of a British exit from President Barack Obama, Britain’s political leaders, major corporations based in Britain and the International Monetary Fund proved useless. If anything, they goaded a mood of defiant anger against those very elites.This resentment has its roots in many things but may be summed up as a revolt against global capitalism. To heck with the experts and political correctness was the predominant mood in the end. A majority of Britons had no time for the politicians that brought the world a disastrous war in Iraq, the 2008 financial meltdown, European austerity, stagnant working-class wages, high immigration and tax havens for the super-rich.”
Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeves: “Identity politics has tended in recent years to be of the progressive kind, advancing the cause of ethnic minorities, lesbians and gays, and so on. In both the U.K. and the U.S. a strongly reactionary form of identity politics is gaining strength, in part as a reaction to the cosmopolitan, liberal, and multicultural forms that have been dominant. This is identity politics of a negative kind, defined not by what you are for but what you are against. A narrow majority of my fellow Brits just decided that at the very least, being British means not being European.”
