A £14 billion Swedish investment bank sold all its UK assets to avoid the pain of Brexit
REUTERS/Jerry Lampen
Henrik Drusebjerg, the chief strategist at the bank - which manages around £14 billion ($17.2 billion) of assets - told Bloomberg on Monday that the bank started to get rid of all its direct UK exposure a few weeks before the June vote.
"We had equities and corporate bonds in Britain before the vote," he said on Bloomberg Radio. "We started selling off our U.K. holdings to absolute zero maybe a month before the vote," he added.
Carnegie started to sell its assets around the time that polls started to narrow in the run-up to the vote. For the large majority of the referendum campaign, the Remain side of the argument held a huge lead, before certain polls started to put Leave in the lead.
That lead then evaporated, and on the night of the vote, markets were pricing a near 100% chance of a remain victory, making the result an enormous shock
As a consequence of its actions, the bank managed to avoid the massive crash in UK asset prices in the days after Brexit, when the pound dropped to 31-year lows and the FTSE 100 fell as much as 9%.
Drusebjerg did not say how much the assets Carnegie sold prior to the vote were worth, but said that the bank is still staying away from the UK because the political and economic picture in the country is too uncertain right now.
"It [Brexit] will definitely end with a deal that is so bad they will either get an election about this new bad deal, or they will have to have a parliamentary election before that," Drusebjerg told Bloomberg.
"It's very possible that Britain will never reach Brexit because I think down the road it will be obvious that the deal they will get will be really, really bad for the economy."
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