Now for the accounting – financial, political and social for the Brexit vote, with Britain on the way to isolation in Europe, a lower credit rating and possible break up.
And the country’s huge financial sector faces disruption from the vote as it becomes clear Britain has lost the highly valuable ‘passport’ which allows banks and other financial groups such as insurers and fund managers to do business in the rest of the EU.
And Britain’s powerlessness to do a deal with the EU was underlined by the surprise resignation at the weekend of Lord Hill, the British EU Commissioner overseeing financial services, the key British interest in Europe.
Now the country has no one with EU experience to help the country’s huge financial services sector strike the best deal with the EU. The irony is that Lord Hill was opposed by the leavers as well as many European politicians.
So it was no wonder that the Financial Times reported at the weekend that some banks had started applying to EU regulators for licences to operate and were working on plans to shift staff and dealing rooms out of London.
That was after a pretty stark warning from the head of the Bank of France and a senior member of the European Central Bank.
"Banks have already begun to take action to shift operations out of the UK, with the governor of France’s central bank warning on Saturday that Britain’s financial services groups were at risk of losing their right to operate across the EU.
“Investment banks have reacted immediately to Britain’s referendum result, with some of the City’s largest institutions approaching regulators to secure licences and lining up executives to relocate,” the FT reported.
Scotland, and perhaps part of Northern Ireland want to remaining the EU – the Scots look like forcing another vote and Ireland (which will be the interface between the EU and newly non-EU Britain) faces growing pressures to sort out the presence and future of the north.
Looking at the biggest immediate impact – the financial, and beyond the immediate market fallout, which is being well managed by major central banks such as the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Fed in the US.
That trio all pledged to provide additional liquidity to financial markets in the aftermath of the UK’s vote – reviving foreign exchange “swap lines” put in place back in the GFC.
That settled some of the market volatility on Friday night and markets ended the trading session much more settled than when they started.
And to that end we heard more from the world’s central bankers at weekend at the annual meeting of the Bank of International Settlements in Switzerland.
But more worrying for Britain’s longer term finances, rating agencies S&P and Moody’s confirmed that the UK will face a credit rating downgrade after voting to exit the EU. And that means higher funding costs for the government, banks and other major borrowers.
Moritz Kraemer, chief ratings officer for S&P, told the Financial Times on Friday that he believed the UK’s triple A rating was “untenable under the circumstances”.
S&P said the UK vote to leave the European Union could cut Britain’s GDP growth by 1% next year, and eurozone growth by 0.5%, economists at Standard & Poor’s global ratings said Friday.
S&P said the vote’s economic impact depends on the Bank of England’s ability to settle the British pound, and actions of other central banks.
The full impact of Brexit won’t become clear for years, but uncertainty and transitional costs for the UK to pull out of the EU are likely to slow growth materially, S&P said.
“The market reaction was more severe because in recent days most polls had suggested that the ‘remain’ camp would win," said Jean-Michel Six, chief economist for Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
“More fundamentally, the reaction illustrates that we are moving into completely uncharted territory, where the only certainty will be uncertainty."
And Moody’s Investors Service has said that it may cut the UK’s credit rating, reducing its outlook to “negative” from “stable” and saying that the vote to exit the EU may herald a “prolonged period of uncertainty “.
“During the several years in which the UK will have to renegotiate its trade relations with the EU, Moody’s expects heightened uncertainty, diminished confidence and lower spending and investment to result in weaker growth,” the ratings agency said.
Moody’s rates the UK at Aa1, having stripped it of its Triple A rating in 2013. Standard & Poor’s was the only one of three major ratings groups that has a AAA rating on Britain. Now that is going.
And then there are the banks and other financial groups and pressure was immediately applied to the UK at the weekend by a senior member of the European Central Bank, the key regulator.
ECB Governing Council member Francois Villeroy de Galhau (who also heads up France’s central bank) said that London’s financial centre was at risk of losing its prized “EU passport”.
Banks based in London rely on a so-called EU passport to operate across the bloc’s 27 national capital market unhindered.
Some banks have said they would shift operations to the euro zone if Britain left the EU. JP Morgan, which had talked about a shift before the vote, denied on Friday that it was now moving, but the rumours will not go away.
Mr Villeroy told France Inter radio.”There is a precedent, it is the Norwegian model of European Economic Area, that would allow Britain to keep access to the single market but by committing to implement all EU rules," he said.
"It would be a bit paradoxical to leave the EU and apply all EU rules but that is one solution if Britain wants to keep access to the single market."
"What happened on Thursday is bad news, first of all for Britain," he said. "Of course there will be negative consequences for the European economy but there will be much more limited than the negative consequences all experts forecast for the UK economy."
