CNBC published charts about Brexit ten years later. Charts showing growth, immigration, sterling, trade, and politics. All of it measuring a decade of consequences from a vote nobody thought would pass.
The UK economy changed. Politics changed. The pound changed. Trade patterns changed. Everything changed except the part where half the country insists it was worth it and the other half acts shocked that voting to leave a trade bloc affected trade.
Ten years of data compiled into visual formats for people who will look at them, nod thoughtfully, and then argue using feelings anyway. Red lines go up. Blue lines go down. None of it matters because both sides already decided what the charts mean before opening the article.
Immigration figures sit there in bar graph form. Sterling's value plotted across 120 months. Trade flows color-coded by region. Growth rates compared to forecasts that were called Project Fear until they turned out accurate, at which point they became fake news.
The charts show exactly what economists predicted in 2016. Retail traders ignored those predictions then. They're ignoring the retrospective data now. Consistent.
CNBC could have published these as interpretive dance or morse code. Same impact. The people who wanted Brexit still want it. The people who didn't still don't. A decade of economic performance data changes precisely zero minds because humans don't update their priors based on evidence. They update their explanations.
Sterling dropped 15% after the vote and trades sideways ever since, but sure, let's spend another ten years debating whether correlation implies causation when the causation was literally the stated goal.
The real story here is that financial media thinks charts matter. They don't. Never have. If they did, technical analysis would work and I'd be writing this from a yacht instead of a Wendy's parking lot in Coventry.
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