Apple carts

How does one upset the economic apple cart if one is in a hurry to do so? The answer is mess with the oil market.

On Wednesday, government-backed Press TV in Tehran said Iran would ban exports of oil to six European countries that had plans to join international efforts to sanction Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program.

This inflation-trigger is likely to take a toll on the European economy first and the global economy second. Higher prices is not what Europe needs, as Eurostat said Wednesday that the economies in nine of the eurozone's 17 member states contracted in the final quarter of 2011.

The Jerusalem Post said Iran had decided to ban exports to the Netherlands, Greece, France, Portugal, Spain and Italy -- decidedly, a kick-'em-while-they-are-down approach.

The gross domestic product for the eurozone as a region -- countries that use the euro as currency -- also fell, dropping for the first time since the April through June stretch in 2009, when the eurozone economy shrank by 0.2 percent.

Compared to the third quarter of 2011, the eurozone's GDP fell by 0.3 percent. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2010, the GDP rose by 0.7 percent.

The quarter's results put Greece, Portugal, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands into a nominal recession, which is not quite the same as an official recession. Nevertheless, the economies of those five countries have contracted for two quarters in a row, which many consider the definition of a recession.

Of course, the shrinking economies of Portugal and Greece are also nominally the cause of the most concern, given they empirically answer the question of whether or not the international community is simply throwing good money after bad with efforts to keep the sovereign debt crisis from spreading further.

If the European Union agrees to bailout out the sinking ships of Portugal and Greece, one has to wonder how many survivors it will take to keep the eurozone intact.

At present, given the state of distress in Athens, the possibility of Greece going into default and exiting the eurozone is not impossible to imagine. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Portugal, granted $103 billion in May, has done all it was asked to do to comply with the terms of its bailout loan. It still is not enough.

The bailout of Chrysler in 2009 meant that the governments of the United States and Canada and the United Auto Workers owned the majority of the company for a time. The European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank cannot own Greece or Portugal for a while. But the so-called troika must realize it is not bailing out the sovereign debts of Greece and Portugal, it is bailing out their economies. That's a horse of a very different color.

In international markets Wednesday, the Nikkei 225 index in Japan rose 2.3 percent, while the Shanghai composite index in China rose 0.94 percent. The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong gained 2.14 percent, while the Sensex in India added 1.98 percent.

The S&P/ASX 200 in Australia climbed 0.25 percent.

In midday trading in Europe, the FTSE 100 index in Britain was flat, rising 0.05 percent, while the DAX 30 in Germany rose 0.78 percent. The CAC 40 in France gained 0.63 percent, while the Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.72 percent.