How EU worked for Britain over Iran

No one in Britain ever points out the benefits being in the European Union. So I will. Just one small example more or less ignored by the country.

When Iran started arresting employees of the British Embassy in Tehran, the EU acted with one voice and called in all the Iranian ambassadors, country by country, to complain. It is what partners do.

It may be stretching it a bit to say that this turned the Iranians around on its own. But they cannot afford to alienate all of Europe. Britain, the not-quite-great Satan, yes. But not 27 countries representing almost 500 million people. 

As of this post, only one is still being held out of the estimated nine who were originally taken. Thank you, EU.

Obama sees some light

Obama's comments that there are tiny signs that the U.S. economy is improving is interesting because he would hardly have said this if it was going to backfire. He is much too clever for that. There are in fact a lot of little signs all over the place, including China, which, let's face it, is just as important as Washington these days.

So let's say the world economy does start to get better -- and financial markets seem happy to accept this -- what about the banks? Economists seem divided into two camps. One says we are having a pretty nasty recession but one that will end. The other says that banks are so beaten up and  indebted that the global economic foundations cannot hold. 

I guess I am in the first camp. The reason is basically that the second offers no hope to anyone. Agreed this is a different recession than others I have gone through. But markets and economies have shown in the past that they are primarily driven by sentiment. So when things start to look up, sentiment improves. Obama is feeding this.