Scant comfort for Abenomics in latest Bank of Japan tankan survey

Tokyo

WITH just one week to go before a politically important parliamentary election, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe drew little comfort on Friday from the findings of the latest tankan survey of business sentiment by the Bank of Japan (BOJ), which showed that confidence remained relatively low in the second quarter of this year.

The quarterly survey, taken across a spectrum of some 9,000 firms, was conducted before Britain opted last Friday in favour of quitting the European Union - a development which has hit stock and currency markets hard and which, it is feared, will inflict further damage upon an already-fragile global economy.