Exiled Canadian

This is also bad news for the banks or building societies that need to lend money to young people who have a career of earning money ahead of them. If BTL ceases to be an attractive "investment" for those who already own their own house outright then who is going to be taking our mortgages?

That's almost sphinx-like in its indecipherability. Care to expand?

I accept that you don't think you were mislead. My point is that others may have been.

In your previous post you drew an analogy between the Leave campaign and a beer commercial; making the point (I assume) that you'd be nuts to believe the beer commercial and by implication the Leave campaign. That strikes me as an admission that the Leave campaign was misleading. Have I missed something?

So you love democracy but you're all in favour of politicians misleading the electorate? That's a very strange position.

But the Brexit campaign(s) didn't say this - they argued that the EU needed the UK so much that we could have our cake and eat it. I don't know how many people voted for the "cake and eat it" deal - but it's not unreasonable to suggest it was at least 5% of the total votes cast. If this is right then there is no majority for "No Deal". I can't prove I'm right - nor can you prove I'm wrong.

What was the will of the majority? No deal, TM's deal, Canada+, Norwegian blue, or something else? That's the problem here.

The problem is that the Brexit process is a fudge of two different types of democracy. Representative democracy where the electorate appoint representatives to represent them (on the sensible basis that most people don't have the time to study in detail every piece of legislation that a government may wish to pass); and Direct democracy - where we all vote on everything. So we had an "advisory" referendum (that didn't bind our representatives) where one of the options - "leave" - meant many things to many people and we're now asking our representatives to approve a version of "leave" when the majority of them think leave itself it's a bad idea. There was no majority for remain. There is also (I suspect) no majority for TM's deal, Canada+, Norway squared, no deal or indeed any other answer. In short we've completely cocked it up. The matter should either have been left to Parliament or the initial referendum question should have been a choice between remain and complete no deal (the only leave option that was guaranteed to be available). In this situation a second referendum is theoretically attractive (it means that the whole issue is resolved in a directly democratic fashion), but as others have pointed out this will leave a rather bad taste in a large number of mouths and the implications of that are potentially unpleasant.

Problem is we're all going to own this. (Those of us without second passports anyway 😉)

Leveraged loans are loans most usually used to finance the acquisition of a company (either by another company or private equity fund). For instance - if I wanted to acquire EC PLC for £100m I might borrow £65m from a bank or debt fund (or syndicate thereof) and then partner with a private equity fund for the remaining £35m. A crude measure of the riskiness of a leveraged loan is the ratio of the loan (plus any debt that has to be repaid before the loan can be repaid) to the target company's EBITDA. These ratios have been rising over the last few years while at the same time the protections in those loans enabling the lenders to take early action to protect their positions have been watered down - remember that the GFC was over 10 years ago, many people now making these loans were making the coffee or in university in 2008, and anyway it's different this time, innit? If corporate performance goes backwards the loans that were made most recently (ie. on the riskiest terms) are likely to be the ones that start smelling bad first. Hence KKR don't want to play anymore. This does not necessarily imply that GFC2 is on the way. That will depend how heavily the clearing banks (which are systematically important) have been playing in this market. A large part of this market is made up of funds acting on behalf of pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds etc. If non Bank actors lose their shirt it won't have a global effect (it may of course affect your pension fund if it was one of the underlying funders).

I have no idea - I think she thought it was OK to use Parliamentary procedure to force the thing through. It's sort of a Technocratic solution by the back door.

Exactly - the lower interest rates the more I have to save for retirement and the less I spend now........

I'd argue that its the primary role of every MP to act in the best interest of the country (as they view it). For the Opposition I accept that this usually means opposing the government with a view to replacing it. This situation is different in that Labour is not in a position to form a government before A50 expires and we exit the EU with no deal. Hence their duty must be (following on from their manifesto position) to attempt to secure a WA that is most closely aligned with their manifesto position as possible, even if that involves co-operating with the Govt. Nowhere in their manifesto did it say "we will act to ensure that the UK leaves the EU with no deal". I'd argue that the WA is closer to their manifesto position than no deal by a considerable margin.

I suppose you come to the Labour role in this sorry fiasco. A fudged series of "tests" that were never going to be met in their manifesto so that they could tell their Brexit voters that they would support Brexit while at the same time telling their Remain voters that Brexit would be so "soft" they wouldn't even notice. Their MP's are now squaring this circle by opposing any deal by reference to these "unicorn" tests and Corbyn is (not so) secretly in favour of no deal (as long as his finger prints aren't on it) as he expects to be swept to power in the GE that follows and will have a free hand to do whatever he wants economically. I suspect the UK will sleep walk into no deal to be honest. If I was TM I would be trying to position it that this is an issue of "national unity" and that it is up to JC to show statesmanlike judgement and help her deliver the least worse outcome from where we are now. I just don't see that happening.