Europe’s senior heavyweights, like Queen Elizabeth and former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl have called for a moment to take a breath after the shock Brexit vote sent panic through world markets, crushed the Pound Sterling and Bond yields, triggered massive volatility on the FTSE, and sent Gold soaring.

An exit from the European Union holds a number of possibilities for UK citizens; the most immediate and realistic is a long period of uncertainty while the UK renegotiates its new tax and visa treaties with each country.

If and when the UK triggers Article 50 and formally starts the leave process, it will have two years to settle complex legislative, constitutional, taxation, and legal status issues. The biggest question is the economic one; what will happen to the UK’s economy? Will it improve, as claimed by the UKIP protectionist businessmen like Arron Banks and Nigel Farage, who bankrolled the Leave campaign? Or will it go into recession, as claimed by a number of experts.

Economists point to the already-existing economic difficulties faced by the UK.

“The UK’s problem remains their double deficit. The chronic budget and the current account deficits. The last time the UK ran a surplus on the current account was the year Italy won the World Cup in Spain and the top scorer was Paolo Rossi. you guessed it — 1982,” says economist Steen Jakobsen of Saxo Bank.

What this means is that the UK is not productive or competitive enough, and is spending more than it makes. This knocks onto its credibility and ability to repay bonds that it sells on the international markets. Just after the Brexit vote, two of the most influential rating agencies downgraded the UK’s economy from triple A to double A. This has an impact on investor confidence in Treasury bonds and on the long-term outlook for other investments, like starting businesses, or hiring personnel.

Who would want to start a business in the UK now, without actually knowing where EU membership will be in two years time?

One positive scenario is that a lower Pound Sterling means better competitiveness:

“The UK also has the lowest productivity of the G7 countries together with Japan. Yes, the UK needs a lower GBP and desperately so and if the ERM crisis of 1992 is any guideline, what comes next for UK is more employment and stronger GDP,” says Jakobsen.

In other words, what the UK economy needs is a good shakeup and it might snap out of its sluggishness.

The alternative is that the uncertainty will start eating into consumer confidence and spending, a core driver of any economy. Already, the media is reporting that big consumer purchases like cars and houses are being put on hold, both in the UK and in EU countries where UK citizens have made their homes.

The word on the street is that UK citizens in European Union member countries are frantically applying for their local passports to avoid any of the worse consequences, like potentially higher taxes, visa requirements, work permit requirements experienced by citizens from third-countries. The 750,000 UK citizens in the EU may have ignored the Brexit vote, thinking it would never pass, but now are regretting that it has crashed down on them hardest of all.

Will the heavyweights’ caution and wisdom prevail, or the fitful incompetence of the UK’s current leaders? While the focus has been on Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece and other countries that went bankrupt in the economic crisis, it is now sharply on the UK, which could be in for much higher costs. At least those countries had the EU solidarity and unity to bail them out. Without the EU - the largest economic bloc in the world - which entity would be able to bail the UK out if it goes into a protracted depression?