Europe swings Right as depression deepens

So says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the U.K. Telegraph's International Business Editor based in London, in his business blog Monday. He notes that in European parliamentary elections "left-wing incumbents in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, Denmark, and of course Britain were either slaughtered, or badly mauled." Evans-Pritchard is not quite sure why, given the "ultimate crisis of capitalism" so many of the "blue-collar working base has swung almost overnight from Left to Right," but he suspects rising unemployment is the key to it all.

Evans-Pritchard was an early economic doom-and-gloomer, and remains so even while most economists and pundits keep tending those 'green shoots" we keep hearing about. He believes that the deficit countries (U.S., U.K., Spain, etc.) have sharply increased their savings rate and thus reduced consumption while the "surplus countries" of China, Japan and Germany have not stimulated demand sufficient to offset this. According to Evans-Pritchard the global system is in depression, with a potentially devastating "Stage II" still to come (a la 1932 after the "green shoots" of 1930-31).

Speaking of green shoots, Evans-Pritchard concludes his recent piece with this:

Don't count on the political fabric of Europe holding together if our green shoots shrivel and die in the credit drought of the long hot rainless summer that lies ahead.

Tough stuff. You won't find that sort of frankness in the American business press.