Wilbur Ross: Brexit Vote Had No Economic Basis
Despite the economic and political turmoil following the Brexit vote, one legendary investor is still not fazed when it comes to Britain’s currency.
“I’ve been buying some pounds—this is personal, not in the funds,” Wilbur Ross, chairman of the W.L. Ross Company, said on the FOX Business Network. “Our funds always hedge back to dollars. So our U.K. holdings, while the price of the shares is a variable, the currency is not something that we have to worry about.”
The June 23 vote determined whether the United Kingdom would leave the European Union. Two major figures who campaigned to leave were former London Mayor Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, who at the time was the leader of the U.K. Independence Party [UKIP]. Farage stepped down from that position earlier this week.
“It’s fascinating to me that the leaders of the leave movement—namely Boris Johnson and [Nigel] Farage—both opted out; so did [Michael] Gove,” Ross said. “So here you have the people who lobbied for leave not having the courage to be there to try to implement… What it tells me is that they never thought they would win; it was just all about political things on their part. They had no plan at all.”
The legendary investor believes the voters’ decision to leave the European Union was based on emotions, and had no economic basis.
“The reality is that the U.K. economy has been doing fine,” he stated. “That’s the other reason I was shocked that they voted to leave. If something’s not broken, you shouldn’t try to fix it.”