I was in the pub with a financial adviser friend earlier this year, not long after the Brexit vote. Being based in Scotland, he'd already seen his business disrupted by the independence referendum in 2014, and now, post-Brexit, he was worrying about the prospect of a re-run. "I've been in this business for 30 years," he told me. "But I've never spent as much time thinking about politics as I have this year."
I know what he means. There was a time, before the financial crisis, when markets would cheerfully shrug off political leadership. The blissful assumption was that most nations were heading in the same direction. An embrace of shareholder capitalism, free trade, "independent" central banking, and minimal interference in markets was inevitable.
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