We could be set for rail, lorry, jobs chaos – and Posen blames Brexit.
Exiting the European Union will send the British economy back to the 1970s, former Bank of England rate setter Adam Posen has warned.
Posen, a former member of the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee and current president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, made the waning on Bloomberg TV.
He said: "Brexit is going to be an ongoing source of chronic pain for the UK for many years.
"It is going to put the UK in many ways back to where it was in the 70s and early 80s. Being uncompetitive, people having less faith in the stability of the regime and having to re-balance in very interventionist ways."
Brexit will cause several years of "chronic pain" for Britain, economist Adam Posen says https://t.co/9Yq7UnTVWA pic.twitter.com/fp5CvzC0iO
— Bloomberg Brexit (@Brexit) October 28, 2016
For those too young to remember 1970s Britain suffered a long running period of relative economic malaise, dogged by rising unemployment, frequent strikes and severe inflation.
When asked if there were any positives from the decision to leave Posen's answer was short: "No"
Posen has been vocal in his condemnation of the decision to leave since the vote was cast back in June.
Speaking in the aftermath of the vote he said: "Like any reasonable economist I’m very saddened by the vote, because the great consensus was, and rightly, that this was going to be very damaging for the UK, potentially quite damaging to Europe.
"For the UK this creates enormous uncertainty, but it also is a fundamental change in their competitiveness. And I don’t think even the very large fall in pound sterling that we’ve seen is going to be enough to make up for that.
"They had a role in Europe as a financial center and even almost more importantly as a beachhead for foreign companies, particularly US companies wanting to export into Europe. And that’s frankly going to go away, not entirely but a lot more and a lot faster than many people seem to think."
