Not really. The EU is about free trade and travel is part of that but each member nation should still have sovereignty. The EU has been taking that away more and more. It's more a bureaucracy like the UN that, unlike the UN, requires every member to abide by its rules in order to stay on the boat. I think this slump with the UK economy is short term caused by bad planning and too much trust in polling data. Even Nate Silver, supposed god of statistics, was wrong on Brexit.
Free trade is a part, but not, by any means, the biggest part of the EU. The free travel section is in fact one of the biggest components of the deal and pretty central to it. The UK was able to not use the Euro, but NOT able to change the free travel portion. That's how big it is.
And while people have been talking about getting rid of the free travel, it's almost always been foolish bullshit, where people want to be able to have free travel, but also cut off immigrants. It's pretty silly xenophobic nonsense. And while Silver was wrong, he's been wrong on a LOT of things (Trump is another huge miss for 538). Statistics are great, but have significant weaknesses for things that haven't been studied and documented to death.
UK's currency and market are having issues because people bet on Remain winning and lost. I know a couple people that bet on Leave winning and they made a killing off of shorting the pound
You're conflating two completely different things. Some PEOPLE have made money shorting the pound. If more people had shorted the pound, the pound still would have plummetted. The economy still would have plummeted. Some people making money is in no way shape or form representative of the larger economic impacts. There have been SIGNIFICANT economic impacts, as predicted, and these will continue in the long term (as predicted). While I was slightly dismissive of Silver above, it was because the idea that a person can "predict" something like people's opinions on a historic thing (which Silver, and any statistician will always have difficulty with), while the economic impacts of uncertainty, of bargaining AGAINST a collective, etc. have been pretty rigorously studied.
I agree it's unlikely but it has a better chance there than the US
Also, other Leavers would be able to make better deals with the UK as Selerox points out. Once the UK economy rebounds (which it will), other EU members might start wondering why they are shipping off so much money to foreign bureaucrats.
No, they are going to have LESS of an input than the US, because they are going to be at a significant disadvantage in negotiating power.
I also think that both you and Selerox are WILDLY underestimating the bargaining power of the EU. While the UK is a huge financial sector, and matters a lot, they don't matter nearly as much as the rest of the EU, and if there are rumbles of other countries pulling out, you would have to be an idiot to think that they would hardball the UK to scare those rumbles into quieting down. A really shit deal with the UK would have negative consequences for the EU in general, but WAY worse ones for the UK, and in the medium run (the next 5 years or so), taking a small hit while fucking over the UK would be a significantly better step for the EU in general, solidifying the pact. I think ideas of the EU just falling apart and some better arrangement happening are fantasies.
This, by the way, is how the US keeps getting relatively crap deals in trade negotiations despite being pretty much the most important country in the world. Because unilateral strength isn't as strong as nationalists think it is.
I don't really agree that is necessarily fair. I definitely think that is how the US media is spinning it, though, and there definitely is a fair amount of racism and nationalism going on there.
The US media is being pretty chill about it. Most coverage in the UK and France (the international news I can actually take in regularly) spins it that way. And while it isn't necessarily fair, it's mostly true. There is an essentially unanimous understanding that this will hurt the UK for a good period of time and fail to deliver on almost any of the promises. It's a fantasy for isolationists afraid of foreigners.