Edward Price has enjoyed a special vantage point into big changes in the global economy. He was Britain’s man on Wall Street all the way from the United Kingdom’s formal triggering of the exit process in 2017 through the its final departure from the European Union earlier this year. As a trade official with the consulate in New York, his job was to field questions from hedge funds, banks, and asset managers and feed that intel back to London. That position put him in the heart of the information flow around one of the great drivers of global uncertainty.
You might say that the development of the EU’s four freedoms—things that the Anglo-Saxon audience would simply describe as markets—over time has emphasized the movement of people and goods over capital and services. If you look at the U.K.’s national specialisms, it was the export of capital and services, and those are invisible.
What I’m trying to say here, politely, is that as the EU integrated, it emphasized goods and free movement of people, and it didn’t necessarily spend as much time developing capital and services, and you can see that today. When we were going into the referendum [in the U.K. in 2016],
