This is about the worst possible policy announcement the ECB could make. The only hope is that the bond market finds it credible enough to never test it.

Yesterday I noted what a consequential week this would be for the European economy, as the European Central Bank prepared to make its decision on how to deal with soaring bond yields in Italy and Spain. ECB President Mario Draghi let some of the cat out of the bag yesterday, hinting that the central bank would purchase short-dated sovereign debt instruments from those nations. Just hinting at this is already affecting markets.

We have another week where the speeches at a national convention won’t be the most important in the context of the world economy. The European Central Bank meets this week amid high expectations that they will take action to finally arrest the unusually large bond price spikes from troubled Eurozone sovereigns like Spain and Italy. Shares in European stock markets drifted higher in anticipation of the announcement of a program to purchase bond debt from those countries and push the yields lower. However, that may not be part of the initial announcement this week

The upshot of Ben Bernanke’s speech at the economic symposium at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, at least to most interested observers, is that the Federal Reserve will enact a new round of quantitative easing at their next policy meeting the week of September 10.

For half a second I felt like I was being too hard on Ben Bernanke and his Jackson Hole speech. Mr. Market certainly thinks it presages another round of quantitative easing, with stocks up big today. And it’s considerate Fed-speak to merely hint and nod at a policy change before embarking on it, probably at the September 13 meeting.

But all of that went away when Joe Weisenthal got to the heart of his disappointment in the speech, and really in Bernanke’s tenure as well as the whole of the economic policy apparatus

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is giving a closely watched speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming at an annual economic symposium. And I can summarize this speech for you in metaphor:

Water works well at fighting fires.
Everything is on fire.
We may hook up the hose at some point.
Not promising anything.

The Republican Party platform includes an endorsement of a commission to study the return of America to the gold standard, a gift to Ron Paul supporters who have steadfastly supported the 19th century-era idea.

The European Central Bank spent most of yesterday rejecting any hope of an imminent intervention in the European bond markets, to put a cap on the spread between the yields of the cheapest and most expensive sovereign bonds. But Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph (UK) not only confirmed the existence of the program, but said Germany would get behind it.

According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, the European Central Bank has floated a scheme to set limits on bond yields for sovereign debt among member nations in the Eurozone, essentially through a mass bond-buying program. But the ECB quickly put out something like a denial.

Europe is tanking today after the European Central Bank’s Mario Draghi quite literally failed to put his money where his mouth is. Last week, Europe cheered when Draghi said in a press conference that the ECB would do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. He also said that the high bond yields in Spain and Italy interfered with his ability to conduct monetary policy.