On Friday the Morning Joe crew marveled over Brexit as the people of the UK spoke loud and clear: they want out of the European Union. Panelist after panelist on the morning show expressed shock and concern over the UK’s decision to go it alone. Economist Steve Rattner, on the other hand, stuck out like a sore thumb as he painted a rosier picture of the UK’s seismic decision.
WILLIE GEIST: Does this break-up change that for the UK? Does it make it less likely they'll be dragged down?
STEVE RATTNER: It does, to some degree, I think there are some pluses here. But let me show you the last piece so we can talk about it. And the same is true on unemployment as well where you can see the US and the UK with fairly similar unemployment rates. The U.S. actually bit lower than this but we wanted to get the dates to line up. But then you can see that across Europe, you see massively higher unemployment, much of it structural, much of it in need of huge kinds of structural reforms. And so I would simply say that while I don’t disagree with everything Richard and others have been saying about the huge risks of this with Scotland, with Northern Ireland, with who knows what, in some ways it’s not out of the question that Britain could be somewhat better off detaching itself from Brussels and being able to live its own destiny as an independent country again.
Just as the UK will go it alone, so too did Steve Rattner in suggesting that Britain “could be somewhat better off.” Seldom do MSNBC have guests offer different perspectives on such polarizing issues. Immigration, trade and terrorism were major driving points of the vote, and according to the Electoral Commission, some 46.5 million people were eligible to take part in the referendum and roughly 33 million votes were cast, or 72% of eligible voters.
Despite realistic fears over the uncertainty of the UK’s future and whether this will have a domino effect on the rest of Europe, one thing is certain. The overwhelming majority of people in the UK will be celebrating their Brexit victory in full force this weekend; they’ll worry about the repercussions later.
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06-24-16 MSNBC Morning Joe
08:27:28 AM – 8:30:03 AMWILLIE GEIST: Steve Rattner has come equipped with his charts breaking down the climate in Europe that’s driving the discontent that led to the vote, UK leaving the EU. What do you got, Steve?
STEVE RATTNER: Well I was up all night having to redo my charts.
GEIST: I know you were.
RATTNER: After this surprise outcome. But let's talk about a few of the factors that I think were driving this British decision which was of course a surprise. First, let's talk about immigration. And what you can see here is that immigration has risen substantially across the developed world in the U.S. As well as in most countries in Europe. It's in the 11 to 17%, as high as that in Sweden but what’s particularly interesting in Britain is it went from 6% to 13%, which is a pretty big increase. As you know, within Europe, any resident of any country in Europe can move to any other country in Europe, and this was one of the things very much, I think, destabilizing the Brits as they faced the prospect of this referendum. The second thing we should talk about is the difference in the economy between Britain and the rest of the continent. And I think this is where the analogies between the U.S. and what's going on here and what went on in Britain are not always completely perfect. What Britain to some degree was trying to do was to detach itself from a part of the world that has just not been doing very well. If you look at the recovery since the end of—since the beginning of the recession, at the end of 2007, our economy has grown 10%. The UK economy has grown 7.5%. So not that far off. The Eurozone has grown 1%. Japan has grown less than that. So the Brits are looking at the continent saying this is a place that is tied up in its own underwear, it doesn’t know how to get its economy going, and why do we really want to be part of that and bet old by Brussels what we have to do, what kind of food we can eat, what kinds of worker safety rules we have and everything else.
GEIST: Does this break-up change that for the UK? Does it make it less likely they'll be dragged down?
RATTNER: It does, to some degree, I think there are some pluses here. But let me show you the last piece so we can talk about it. And the same is true on unemployment as well where you can see the US and the UK with fairly similar unemployment rates. The U.S. actually bit lower than this but we wanted to get the dates to line up. But then you can see that across Europe, you see massively higher unemployment, much of it structural, much of it in need of huge kinds of structural reforms. And so I would simply say that while I don’t disagree with everything Richard and others have been saying about the huge risks of this with Scotland, with Northern Ireland, with who knows what, in some ways it’s not out of the question that Britain could be somewhat better off detaching itself from Brussels and being able to live its own destiny as an independent country again.
GEIST: We'll look at some of the immediate fallout in just a minute. Dow futures down nearly 500 points on news Britain is leaving the European Union.
