The United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union, also known as Brexit, will set off a chain reaction process leading to the collapse of the bloc and an international financial crisis, Trends Research Institute head Gerald Celente told Sputnik on Friday.
“The Brexit vote is the beginning of the end of the European Union,” Celente said. “As we had forecast in the attached Top Trends of 2016 Trends Journal … The Panic of 2016 is on!”
The final result of the referendum held on Thursday was 52-48 percent in favor of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union. The majorities to leave across most of England were larger than the centers in Scotland, Northern Ireland and London who wished to remain in the 28-nation bloc.
Celente explained that the US referendum’s vote on Thursday was part of a trend across Europe to reject the old political establishments.
Examples of the trend, Celente noted, included most recently “Sunday’s vote in Italy where Virginia Raggi, a member of The 5 Star Movement won the Rome mayoral race, ” and the rising popularity of Marine Le Pen’s National Front party in France, the Alternative for Germany (AFD) and the Freedom Party in Austria.
“There is widespread disgust with the entrenched ruling parties that have been running most European nations since the end of World War II,” Celente observed.
These movements were not primarily emotional or irrational, Celente pointed out, but primarily economic and based on the clear record of failure of the EU leadership in Brussels and the ruling establishments that supported it.
“By all quantitative measures, since the [financial] panic of 2008, the strategies and actions taken by Brussels to restore economic growth have failed… as have their inability to control the migrant and refugee crisis,” Celente stated.
The immigration issue proved to be a major force motivating UK voters to support Brexit, Celente said.
“A major ‘Leave’ motivation was migration and the claim that United Kingdom citizens lost jobs to lower paid migrants,” he emphasized.
The Brexit vote would also lead to the collapse of the web of financial institutions that tied the European nations together, Celente predicted.
“It is also signaling the beginning of the end of the European Central Bank system and subsequently will expose the fundamentally flawed and rigged nature of the global central banks,” he maintained.
The Brexit vote and the gathering crisis engulfing the entire European Union would also pose major challenges to other governments around the world, Celente warned.
“On the grander geopolitical scale, as nations seek independence from central government control, economic and political chaos will accelerate between the status quo and the agents of change,” he added.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron has resigned and is now heading a caretaker government until a new government is instituted in the fall.
