The Dancing Draghi

It's important to watch what European Central Bank president Mario Draghi is doing rather than what he is saying, and right now he is madly printing euros out the backdoor.

As for what he is saying, he is all over the dance floor, dancing to all kinds of tunes. Here WSJ on his dance moves:

Mario Draghi has been all over the map in the past week, literally and figuratively.

In testimony and press conferences that took the new European Central Bank president from Germany to France and, on Thursday, to Abu Dhabi, Mr. Draghi at first glance delivered decidedly mixed messages.

At last week’s ECB press conference in Frankfurt, the economic message was cautiously upbeat: conditions were starting to stabilize albeit with plenty of risks. “There are tentative signs of a stabilization in activity at low levels,” he said after the ECB meeting, which some economists took as a signal that future rate reductions are unlikely.

On Monday, in testimony to the European parliament in Strasbourg, Mr. Draghi struck a decidedly more pessimistic tone on risks to the financial markets emanating from the debt crisis. “We are in a very grave state of affairs and we must not shy away from this fact,” Mr. Draghi told lawmakers. He spoke then in his capacity as head of the European Systemic Risk Board, a supervisory body comprised of central bankers and regulators.

Governments must act on past commitments to improve governance of fiscal policies, he said Monday. “Decisions without matching actions are not enough,” he said. “Only a well-coordinated, coherent and properly timed strategy will yield the desired results.”

He got the pom-poms out again on Thursday after a meeting with central bankers in the Middle East, saying he is “confident” that “the overall situation for the euro will look much better in 2012,” as euro-zone countries address their budget deficits.

Euro-zone states have made “very significant progress on the fiscal front” in the past eight months, with many states showing “extraordinary determination,” “conviction” and “realism” in carrying out reforms, he said.

In truth, there is no "progress" there is Draghi printing and that is all.