Pew Study: Europeans Rapidly Losing Faith in Europe

By Gregor Peter Schmitz in Washington

In just the last 12 months, support for the European Union has plummeted on the Continent. Furthermore, many have lost faith in their elected representatives. Only in Germany do people still view the EU favorably, and the split with the rest of Europe is widening.

Europe's ongoing economic crisis and lasting currency woes are beginning to rapidly erode faith among Europeans in the EU project. That is the result of a new survey undertaken by the renowned Pew Research Center in Washington D.C. and released on Monday evening.

The institute polled 8,000 people in eight European Union member states in March and arrived at some disturbing results. In just one year, the share of Europeans who view the European Union project favorably plummeted from 60 percent in 2012 to just 45 percent this year. Furthermore, only in Germany does a majority continue to support granting more power to Brussels in an effort to combat the ongoing crisis.

Forget Cyprus, Japan Is The Real Crisis

Forget Cyprus. A much bigger story in the coming weeks and months will be in Japan, where one of the greatest economic experiments in the modern era is about to begin. A country where government debt even dwarfs those of Europe’s crisis-ridden nations, Japan will attempt to inflate its way out of a 23-year deflationary spiral.

The overwhelming consensus among the world’s economists is that quantitative easing (QE) has saved the day in the U.S. and that Japan needs to follow suit, on a larger scale. I beg to differ and suggest this policy will almost certainly lead to a hyperinflationary disaster in Japan. If that’s right, it will have serious ramifications for other countries, dragged down by an acceleration of the so-called currency wars. More broadly though, it is likely to destroy the myth pushed by today’s economists that QE is a cure-all for downtrodden economies. It isn’t and Japan will become the template to prove it.

Monster stimulus on the way
The new Bank of Japan (BoJ) Governor, Haruhiko Kuroda, started work on Thursday and his first day on the job disappointed investors.