Francis Scotland, director of global macro research at Brandywine, believes Europe is the "bad boy" of the world's financial systems.
Mr Scotland was speaking at the seventh Morningstar Investment Conference which takes place on 14-15 May.
His presentation was titled 'The risk of success' and looked at the impact of quantitative easing should it succeed or fail.
He said: "Europe is the bad boy due to severe fiscal austerity. This is the wrong medicine in a world where there is not much spending and it is limiting GDP growth.
"But there is good news, we're coming to the end of this story, austerity is over and I think we'll see improvements over the next 12 months, two years."
Mr Scotland argued that the success of quantitative easing for central banks could mean a "renormalisation of interest rates and realignment of asset prices".
He said: "We've had a $7tn expansion in the balance sheets of the world's central banks and this is unprecedented. Noone knows what the long term consequences of this is."
He said people were still behaving pessimistically and this was driving the value out of safe havens.
Brandywine Global Investment Management manages $45bn in assets and offers equity, fixed income and balanced portfolios in US, international and global markets.
Speakers at the event today include Greg B Davies from Barclays Wealth, Holly Mackay from The Platforum and Stephen Snowdon from Kames Capital.
Topics include the 'long finance movement', risk aversion, global emerging markets and behavioural finance.
There will be a panel session on platform investment trends with Mark Polson from the Lang Cat, Ian Taylor from Transact, Tom Sheridan from Seven Investment Management and Graham Bentley from gbi2.
There is a dedicated Morningstar Conference mobile/tablet app where delegates can access presentations, videos and speaker profiles.