Obama's US sets the recession-fighting tone and Barroso's EU can only follow.

(From Guardian Unlimited)

Back in a dark and gloomy EU capital swept by snow and sleet after a sunny week in high-altitude New Mexico and there's palpable hubris in the air.

Europe has persuaded itself it has led the world in solving the banking crisis; now it thinks it can show Barack Obama how to reboot the global economy out of recession.

Ahead of a crucial EU summit this week, Jos' Manuel Barroso, the European commission president, offered the US president-elect a transatlantic economic pact, a joint platform based on European ideas of how to stimulate the economy.

The Americans, an unusually combative Barroso opined, are coming round to Europeans' way of thinking — and not just on the recession but on climate change, with Obama set to adopt a cap-and-trade system for reducing carbon emissions pioneered by the EU.

His assertion of European power, both of ideas and …