It's way easier to go without something entirely than to lose it. We keep hearing we're a trading, maritime nation, we'll be just a maritime nation.
I have no idea why you're so blase about this unless you genuinely have no idea what it all entails. If we cock it up, and all signs are that we're doing our utmost to, it really won't be fine. The Tories in charge of Brexit have made it abundantly clear that they have no idea what they are doing and would rather play to the audience. Businesses have a duty to their shareholders to start looking at relocating some of their enterprise right now.
We'll go from having free trade in goods and services with the EU-27 and nominally free trade with a collection of others to having free trade with no-one, no protection from the WTO, no structure to trading, and being unable to strike free trade agreements for a period. This may just make businesses somewhat more reluctant to do business here.
Free trade agreements aren't made for fun. The WTO doesn't exist for fun. Clearly countries enter into such things for a reason, and anything that makes life harder will cost money.
These aren't my opinions, they are the opinions of experts from constitutional and trade law, and it's way past project fear time now. I appreciate that no-one cares about experts anymore, just their own ill-informed opinions, but it's always worth reading them so you know what to ignore.
We can blow sunshine up our own arses and pretend that we're this magical, unicorn tipped miracle that doesn't need any of these because we've taken back control or we can get our heads out of said arses and perhaps encourage politicians to take theirs out too and get the best deal for the country rather than whatever they thing will win them the most votes.
I've pretty much given up on any prospect of being in the EEA now with Labour deciding to play UKIP probably putting an end to it, but an abrupt end to our current arrangements with no transition is, according to pretty much everyone bar politicians, a bad idea.
About the only thing we can do to ameliorate this is to render the years of austerity pointless by going on a spending and tax cutting spree and running deficits, which will be awesome. Over half a decade of austerity made pointless by a vote to self-harm.
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We can trade with them now. We just can't strike any trade deals until we've sorted our membership of the WTO.
https://www.ft.com/content/5741129a-...f-79eb4891c97d
Such states as Argentina can veto our attempts at joining the WTO. They have absolutely no reason to make this easy for us. We have absolutely no leverage with them.
See previous regarding Germany - need a deal with the entire EU-27.
The politicians claiming this is a copy-paste job, entirely under our control once we leave are, simply, lying.