OUR European Central Bank says he is confident in his ability to buy the debt of countries that investors are targeting. This tone of confidence has kept the market calm, which is exactly what Frankfurt needs. It turns out these statements without real intervention are the best way to avoid a crash in sovereign bonds and force countries to clean up their finances.

Last year, as the cost of borrowing in heavily indebted countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece began to rise, before the ECB began raising interest rates, the President of the Bank, Christine Lagarde, said central banks would help countries facing unusual pressure on their debt performance by buying distressed bonds if needed. This is a TRI tool that very quickly became known as the “defense of Italy” and which bore fruit without being activated. A common measure of eurozone market anxiety, Italy’s 10-year bond spread, has fallen from the 250 basis points it was at when the program was announced to 184 basis points. Falling energy prices and the resilience of the eurozone economy have also helped.

The paradox of central banks today is that the promise of unlimited support alone ends up costing the least. When financial markets are convinced that the ECB is willing to do whatever it takes to protect the euro, investors are much less likely to attack over-indebted countries and threaten the monetary union with collapse. This is much more likely when the markets are dealing with an instrument with a limited budget. But to succeed in this impression game, central banks must be credible. The U.S. Fed, with its massive funds and the backing of a global superpower, managed to prevent a transmission of the crisis from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank by pledging to cover the two banks’ uninsured deposits. And the markets took that promise as a bailout for every other bank, and so far the Fed hasn’t had to.

Ten years ago, the ECB did the same with the HTA program, which it attached, however, with conditions. Whichever country is interested will first have to negotiate either a full bailout package or at least a precautionary line of credit from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) in exchange for specific government commitments. The program in question remains at the disposal of the countries, but no one wants to be branded as having appealed to the ESM, and therefore it is not used. Now a new instrument, TRI, requires countries to generally comply with EU fiscal rules. The government is much easier to take advantage of this program, so it can easily encourage the emergence of new errors. In addition, when a country wants to resort to support for the program in question, other member countries may condemn it for non-compliance with fiscal rules. And, of course, the ECB is delicately silent about exactly when and how it will activate this instrument.

The bank wants to make the tool available only to those countries that have not yet lost market access, but simply risk losing it for reasons beyond their control. Essentially, central banks are promising to save the world in the hope that they won’t have to.