Portfolio Adviser has collected a number of the bigger ones below as they are expressed by various chief investment officers, economists and strategists.
A Large shock but, ultimately, a local one
Stephanie Flanders, chief market strategist for Europe, JP Morgan Asset Management
“The economic and political questions raised by this vote will not be answered for years, possibly decades. But the immediate questions for investors are how long the “risk-off” mood in markets will continue and how much damage it will do in the process.
“The UK economy will slow sharply. Our best estimate is that growth will slow from an annualised pace of 1.6% to around 0.6% in the second half of 2016, with a similar growth rate achieved in 2017. We can expect inflation to jump to 3% or 4% by the second half of 2017, as a direct result of the decline in sterling. That compares with a previous forecast of around 1.7%.
“We expect the Bank of England (BoE) to look through the rise in inflation. Policy will surely be looser than it would have been under Bremain. The BoE will make clear its willingness to offer emergency liquidity to the market, but it may well wait to gauge its response to the slowdown in economic activity. We also expect it will think hard before intervening to defend the pound. The fall so far today has been dramatic, by any standard, with the pound at one point falling to its lowest level against the dollar in 30 years. But the scale of the fall has been exaggerated by the rally preceding the vote. Arguably, a double digit decline in the currency is not an over-reaction to a policy change of this magnitude.”
Stepping off the precipice
Richard Champion, deputy chief investment officer, Canaccord Genuity Wealth Management
“”Today we stepped off the economic and political precipice. We now need to work out how we extricate ourselves from the EU, while at the same time hanging on to our national integrity. Sterling, company profits, unemployment, economic growth – a big fat question mark hangs over everything. And we still have to navigate a path through austerity, weak global growth, geopolitical dangers and addressing the UK’s structural weaknesses: low productivity growth, poor education, and unsustainable debt. It was hard enough doing this in the EU. Now we all have to roll up our sleeves and make our new status work.”
