LPC London Vicky Pryce Economist Boris Johnson No Deal Brexit

The prospect of a No Deal Brexit has been dismissed by the business department’s former Chief Economist, despite Boris Johnson’s expressed determination to leave the EU by the end of October.

Vicky Pryce, who is now Senior Economist at the Centre for Economics & Business Research, predicted during her opening keynote presentation our London Property Club meeting that the new prime minister will not follow through on his pledge to leave the EU with or without a deal.

She said: “There is zero chance of no deal Brexit, anyone who wants to lead the country won’t do it because they just won’t survive. The politician’s first instinct is to survive and someone like Boris Johnson, who has worked so hard, won’t want to throw it away just like that. And he will throw it away if he doesn’t handle it well.” [emaillocker id=”71749″]

She also rubbished the idea that the economy had experienced a post Brexit bounce, noting that the UK has seen declining investment in every quarter since the EU referendum except for the first three months of this year when companies had been stockpiling.

She said: “We are poorer but the economy has managed to keep growing: employment should not be seen as the only indicator of how well we are doing.”

Pryce told delegates that the economy had been sustained, since the EU referendum, by the Bank of England’s post Brexit interventions to keep the economy afloat. The easing of capital requirements by the central bank had injected £160bn into the UK economy, which dwarfed even the £60bn Quantitative Easing programme introduced in the wake of the financial crisis.

She said: “We’re fooling ourselves if we think that the economy has sustained itself since the referendum because Brexit was fine. It was sustained because the Bank of England cut rates and put in huge amounts of intervention.”

But even a deal with the EU would not deliver much of a fillip to growth, the CEBR economist said: “If there is an arrangement that allows for a transition there will some bounce back but it’s not going to be very significant.”

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