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Matt O’Brien: Trump hasn’t made the US economy better, but Brexit has made the UK economy worse

One thing we can say for sure is there was a 2016 vote that significantly altered its county's economic fortunes.

No, I'm not talking about President Donald Trump's shock election, but rather Britain's equally surprising decision to leave the European Union. Although, as we'll get to in a minute, it didn't change things in a good way. That, at least, is what economists Benjamin Born, Gernot Müller, Moritz Schularick, and Petr Sedlácek found when they looked at how those two economies have done the past two years compared to what could have reasonably been expected of them.

Now, to paraphrase economist Robert Solow, we can see a Trump effect everywhere but in the macroeconomic statistics.