I am not talking of a 2008 style crash but slower economic growth as companies stall their investment because of increased costs to one of our biggest markets and less flexible movement of people and services which are important for those companies which operate across Europe. That's not to stay they can't operate like this, of course they can as they do elsewhere, but that their costs increase and it may be more competitive then to put more investment in places like Germany where they'll still have that access.
The response to this is that people still trade with nations that they do have deals with but to suddenly have even minor tariffs is a hit to companies and deal in bulk. To longer to be able to sell services to many nations as if it were your own is a hit.
The boss of Siemens (or former boss) had a good article about it here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/1...s-UK-boss.html
I also linked to this FT article a while back but it's worth seeing again as it's relatively measured and fair. It looks at the different scenario and largely concludes there would be an impact from leaving:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/70d0bfd8-d...#axzz46ly9CC4x
---------- Post added at 20:17 ---------- Previous post was at 20:10 ----------
The SNP did this as well though. Any time anyone said there would be a cost to Scotland leaving the Union they shouted scaremongering, any time we said you can't have a Currency Union they said it was bulling and any time people dismissed their notion of unicorns and rainbows in a Independent Scotland skeptics were dismissed as Project Fear.
When your campaign is based on the idea that the status-quo is better than the given alternative then all you have is to argue what you would lose. This isn't the most inspiring message but it's what there is, sometimes the choice isn't great and you can't sell it as anything other than the best of an imperfect situation.
Remain are entitled to argue that there would well be a nasty economic hit if we withdraw from the a large single market without much of any idea of what we will replace it with.