Is Brexit’s impact coming at us like a derailed train – or am I panic-mongering?

I enjoyed the Daily Mail’s lambasting of the Financial Times as ‘panic-monger-in-chief’ for its doom-laden post-Brexit tone: ‘Is it determined to provoke a downturn in a bid to justify its lurid predictions?’ And I’m happy to let ‘Britain’s most self-important business newspaper’ take some flak, my own rather downbeat column last week having been so at odds with our ‘optimist’s guide’ on other pages.

Panic-mongering used to be the Mail’s own stock-in-trade back in the Gordon Brown era, when it regularly invited me to wax apocalyptic on ‘the death of the middle classes’ in response to stock-market wobbles and stealth taxes. But there’s a serious point behind its FT-bashing, which is that short-term uncertainty might only turn into recession if we talk ourselves down.

But is that really so, or is the full impact of Brexit coming at us with the force of a derailed train, and nothing anyone says will make the slightest difference? Some economic shocks follow events — epidemic, earthquake, war — while others amplify pessimism in anticipation of events yet to come. This one is currently in the second category, and will only migrate towards the first when foreign-owned car factories start closing and the infrastructure projects I listed last week are actually cancelled.

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Julie Burchill

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In the meantime, you don’t have to subscribe to the Johnsonian rhetoric about glorious new trading horizons to recognise that, so far and in parts, investor sentiment has held up better than expected. Despite the loss of our triple-A credit rating, UK government bonds are still sought as a safe haven — hence record low yields. The robustness of the FTSE100 index reflects that fact that, following the pound’s fall against the dollar, international investors can buy shares in London-listed global companies at bargain prices, and those companies will likely report higher sterling profits from overseas operations.