Reverberations from the Brexit were less than three weeks old when BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, offered some grim news for anyone thinking about retirement. Its CoRI (cost of retirement income) index, a metric designed to tell individuals how much retirement income their savings can buy, had climbed almost 10% in only 15 days since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union.

A reasonable person might be forgiven for asking how one distant event could influence so basic a need for hundreds of millions of American adults so quickly. In today’s high-frequency financial markets, Brexit triggered a flight to quality that first drove up the prices of U.S. Treasury bonds, prompting other American bonds and equities to follow suit.

The uncertainty surrounding Brexit isn’t going away anytime soon. Today’s world is more interconnected than most people think. Divorces have been called off before, and Greece, where 60% of the people voted to leave the EU last year, still has yet to initiate the process. The only nation to actually go through with withdrawal was Greenland, which decided it didn’t want to share its fisheries with Europe.

A range of astute observers, like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Gluskin Sheff’s chief market strategist David Rosenberg, initially expressed serious doubts that the separation would ever happen. Dimon subsequently indicated his bank was preparing for a “range of outcomes.” Germany’s finance minister Wolfgang Schauble, who actually wields some power in the ultimate outcome, suggested in the days immediately after the vote that the EU should consider two levels of membership, one for full members and another for associate members.

Whatever happens, the United Kingdom, Europe’s second-largest and healthiest economy, may well emerge in fine condition, although many expect it to enter a recession in the next year. Great Britain’s likely exit will be cushioned partially by its earlier refusal to join the euro, but hedge funds are betting the British pound will fall further. At the least, a weak currency should boost its exports and tourism businesses.

Brexit itself may not be such a watershed event, but the massive discontent it symbolizes in the developed world certainly is. The same forces that propelled the candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in America are more pervasive in Europe, where most nations have upstart political parties challenging the status quo. 

What amazed me as a visitor to England in late June was the degree to which the Brexit debate exposed the fault lines in normally civil, homogeneous British society. Arguments pitted the north against the south, affluent urbanites against the countryside, Scots versus Brits, young against old and working class Brits against immigrants, several of whom reported hate crimes in the days after the vote. On several occasions, senior citizens who voted overwhelmingly to leave complained of confrontations with millennials, predominantly EU remain supporters, who asked their elders, “Why can’t you just die?” But just as in America, older voters turned out in droves while less than 40% of those under 30 years old voted.

The nation’s new prime minister, Theresa May, addressed these divisions, taking radical positions for a leader of the Conservative party. She lashed out against executive pay, scarce opportunities for working class whites, the criminal justice system’s treatment of blacks, and a general consensus that the system favored the very affluent.

Her message was a far cry from Margaret Thatcher’s union-bashing embrace of raw red-meat capitalism that dominated the party a quarter century ago and split the country down the middle. If Brexit happens, its economic reality should help May curb inequality, as London is expected to lose high-paying financial jobs to Frankfurt, Paris and Dublin. Meanwhile, the plunging pound should help manufacturing in England’s rust belt cities like Manchester and Birmingham.

A larger question is what happens to the rest of Europe while the soap opera between London and Brussels unfolds. Several years of history were compressed into a few weeks, but going forward events will play out in slow motion unless there is major downside surprise, according to Krishna Memani, chief investment offer of OppenheimerFunds.

The EU has 26 other member nations, while the euro zone (or monetary union) has 19 members. That means “19 countries in the euro zone have to agree to the status quo,” says Ali Motamed, founder of Invenomic Capital Management. “If you assume that every one of the 19 nations has a 90% chance of remaining, that means there is an 87% chance that someone will leave.”

For global investors, the battleground moves back to the continent. “If you had a breakup of the euro zone it would be awful,” Motamed says.

Unwinding a transnational currency involving 19 nations would be a colossal undertaking. For the sake of comparison, Brexit will involve negotiations between London and Brussels over an estimated 50,000 separate laws, rules and regulations and, thankfully, currency conversion won’t be one of them since the U.K. has its own.

There are several schools of thought about how events unfold. The first is that Brussels will seek to be as punitive as it can with the U.K. to set a precedent that will spook other EU members and keep them from following the U.K.’s lead. 

But that line of thinking fails to take account of the existing links between the U.K. and the Continent. Just drive around England and one sees a huge percentage of German cars. German Chancellor Angela Merkel knows very well her nation’s exports could suffer from a nasty divorce—just as she understands that all the other EU countries will resent Germany’s increased clout when the second most powerful country is no longer on the scene.

For the overbearing, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, Brexit was a warning shot. Nationalist, non-mainstream political parties in France, the Netherlands and other countries have advocated leaving the EU. Most of these parties count many more members and exert more domestic political power than England’s UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) ever did.

Some serious observers of global geopolitics like George Friedman question the very future of the EU itself. A few years ago, “the Brexit vote would have mattered,” Friedman noted at John Mauldin’s Strategic Investment Conference in late May, arguing it was becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Built for peace and prosperity in the 1980s and 1990s, the EU is proving itself unable to deal with the world afflicted by debt, demographics and migration issues that emerged after the advent of the euro in 2000. This became particularly evident during the Great Recession. “Europe didn’t know how to respond; it was beyond them. The U.S. did,” he said.

This doesn’t imply that Europe or even the EU institutions will completely collapse. “Somewhere in Geneva, the League of Nations still has an office,” Friedman joked.

For global investors, Europe could well become the world’s sick man once again. According to Memani, EU growth is already slowing down. This means more than ever that investors should look at buying companies, not countries.

U.S. equities and bonds came out big winners in the income-parched, post-Brexit aftermath, because this nation has better growth prospects, even if they are already priced into valuations. Against a backdrop of prolonged uncertainty in Europe and China, the nations of Canada and Mexico suddenly appear to be bastions of stability. Both those energy-rich countries averted recessions despite oil’s collapse and are now attracting a flood of foreign capital just as the United States is.

Expectations for future returns should be moderated across most asset classes, Memani adds. For advisors designing retirement plans, the challenge just got magnified.

When it comes to expectations, the area where returns should be totally muted is the global bond arena, where negative interest rates in many nations signal a bubble as unprecedented as that of tech stocks in 2000. As of mid-July, 40-year Japanese bonds had climbed almost 50% as institutional investors have typically bought and sold these long-term hot potatoes in hours if not minutes. If that isn’t ringing a bell, what is?