Le Parisien and Aujourd’hui en France are leading with light at the end of the tunnel for the crisis. “There is reason to hope,” says the front page of both papers. BNP Paribas’s quarterly profits are up, Renault and Citroën Peugeot are both making positive noises – Le Parisien says that when the banks and the auto industry are improving that’s a good sign. However we shouldn’t expect that to effect unemployment figures for several quarters. Indeed, the paper asked several people in the street if they thought things were likely to improve and Cynthia Boukaka who is unemployed responded, “I’m pessimistic…businesses are using the crisis as an excuse to fire people or pay them less.” However Thierry Breton, former Finance Minister says that the recession is undeniably slowing down. This does not mean that the economy has returned to growth. That should return at the end of 2009 or start of 2010, he says.

Le Figaro also leads with the economy – its headline is “Big business is resisting better than predicted.” Profits for the CAC40’s 23 biggest companies have dropped but not as much as many thought – that’s being put down to effective cost cutting measures. For that, you can probably read, lay offs in most cases.

Obama here, Obama there, Obama everywhere…and the American public is less enthusiastic than before. Le Figaro says that President Obama gave four live press conferences on prime time television in the past six months. It took Bush 8 years to do that. These press conferences have cost the big networks some 40 million dollars in advertising revenues. Big shows such as American Idol have had to be rescheduled due to these high-profile communication exercises. Network bosses complained that his July 22nd speech on healthcare contained nothing new and only clocked up a combined audience of 24 million. That’s half the number of viewers who tuned for a speech he made in February.

Parodies and jokes about Obama are also beginning to gain popularity. Have a look at this poster on the Le Post website. There are various unflattering photo montages which are pointing fun at the Andy Warhol-style poster that became so famous during his election campaign. It’s unsure who is behind this latest “Obama-as-a-socialist-joker” poster but his political enemies are an obvious possibility.

From Obama on the web to Nicolas Sarkozy… His communications bureau at the Elysee has employed five young internet specialists, according to business paper Les Echos. They’ve just spend some time at the White House to see how things are done there. It might account for Sarkozy announcing he was alive and well after last week’s collapse – on Facebook of all places! So far, he has 140,222 supporters. He also posted photos of Woody Allen’s visit to the Elysee to his Facebook page.