In the preceding post I wrote about the bites Brexit is already taking out of our daily lives at work and play. It’s really hard to fathom what the economics of it are going to be. Bad is the universal opinion, but how bad and in what areas?

The trouble with economic models is that they are not very good at predicting the future. They’re great for explaining and rationalising the past, but that’s not much good when you’re staring down the barrel of the single most important macro event of the last half century. The last economic downturn took some of us a decade to recover from. This one looks like being at least a generation, and not just economically. For the last few years we’ve been in a period of serious isms – isolationism, protectionism, lookafterourselvesism…and this is the background against which Brexit is going to play

The central banks’ methods of, for example, keeping down interest rates to stimulate the economy while at the same time making it more difficult for us to plan for a financially secure retirement, may well not work in 2020 and beyond. They might have the opposite effect. We simply don’t know.

Business uncertainty makes businesses worry and stop spending on the only thing that’s likely to bring them growth, namely marketing. Why is it that the practice of positively influencing the exchange of outcomes between you and your customers the first thing you stop doing when the going gets tough?

Personal uncertainty makes us stop spending money and consuming as much as we were, which of course impacts businesses. It’s the downturn death spiral.

Who knows, perhaps any impending hardship will actually force us to properly embrace the environmental tenets of reduce, reuse, recycle, like our parents and grandparents had to do in wartime eras? Perhaps this kind of economic downturn and conservative/conserving/conservationist behaviour is just what the planet was hoping for. It might re-engender some genuine altruism and community spirit, and turn us from a diet of me-ism to we-ism.

Brexit is a subject that’s possibly broader than any other. It’s pretty much like saying ‘the global economy’, except that it’s broader again, with huge cultural and environmental implications. That’s the problem with a connected world: everything’s connected. Fine when everything is going well, a house of cards if it isn’t.

And, as I write this, the implications of it – uncertain but massive – are starting to bite into the apple of our daily lives. It’s true that business hates uncertainty, but the recent doom and gloom of the Irish broadsheet press is hard to ignore.  Mrs D is very scornful of my comment that I don’t think Brexit is going to affect me very much. I should have perhaps qualified that by saying I was talking about my work. For someone whose business is sales and marketing strategy, the international aspect of this should mean that I’m actually busier.

In truth, while, paradoxically, we’re pretty close to full employment in Ireland, the state bodies that part-fund a lot of business initiatives – and therefore indirectly fund some element of consultants’ income – are reviewing their programs, reducing initiatives and reducing the number of companies on them. At least to my partly-tutored eye.

At an individual and personal level, and as an Englishman working in a die-hard EU country, it’s hard not to feel insecure. Where do you go to insulate your financial future from the impending onslaught that might last long enough to prolong the entry into retirement for those who might be twenty years away from it?

Probably worth a follow-up post on this, I think.