By Greg Peel

The Dow closed up 46 points or 0.4% while the S&P gained 0.2% to 1261 and the Nasdaq was flat.

I seem to recall a little while back that Merkozy put their foot down and entreated that the public airing of differences from officials and politicians must end and disagreements kept in house ahead of ultimate announcements. Such airing of differences has been responsible for a lot of the violent volatility we've experienced in market these past few months as positive headlines have been followed by negative headlines and round and around we go.

Aside from Merkozy themselves, who seem to be on the same page these days, the request appears to have been ignored. On Tuesday night we had a suggestion from the German finance minister that perhaps the E500bn European Stability Mechanism could be brought forward to run concurrently for a period with the E440bn EFSF to provide a further buffer for European difficulties. Wall Street liked it, and we had a bit of a rally. But last night an "unnamed German official" poured cold water on that idea in suggesting the German government was otherwise not enamoured with the proposal. Result? The Dow opened down 90 points.

Wall Street recovered nevertheless as the fingers-crossed optimism hangs in there with respect to the next few days bringing about a comprehensive plan. Somehow I think I've seen this movie before. Indices drifted along for most of the session before kicking up towards the close when yet again a rumour emerged that the IMF was about to inject E600bn (or is it dollars?) into Europe. This rumour pops up every now and again, this time with the G20 supposedly the collective financier, and as before the suggestion was quickly denied by the IMF.

Oh and Standard & Poor's put the European Union itself on negative watch last night, along with a whole lot of European banks. Everyone fell about.

So over the course of session the Dow was down as much as 90 and up as much as 100 before not really going anywhere much by the close, as might have been expected. Nervous? Oh yes.

The euro wandered around as well with little result, leaving the US dollar index down a bit at 78.44. The Aussie is up half a cent to US$1.0304 but that is all about yesterday's Australian GDP result which came in better than expected. The above-consensus result has now inspired suggestions perhaps the RBA was a bit hasty on Tuesday, but I'd be very surprised if the RBA did not have a good idea of what that number was going to be. Someone with a closer knowledge of the RBA-ABS relationship might be able to correct me. Either way, Tuesday's cut was a lot more about the global picture than it was about the domestic picture.

Gold was up US$14.30 to US$1742.30/oz and base metals were yet again mixed and unsubstantial. A surprise rise in US crude inventories (every week's a surprise ? oil forecasters are apparently clueless) had West Texas down US70c to US$100.58/bbl and Brent down US$1.28 to US$109.23/bbl.

The SPI Overnight was down 8 points or 0.2%.

There's not a lot more to be said at this point. Tonight we'll see whether the ECB cuts by 25bps or 50 and what other policy tweaks new president Mario Draghi might come up with, and then on Friday night the EU members get together, but usually there's no result before the close of Wall Street anyway, leaving the weekend as the time to assess any developments.

Before that we have local employment numbers out today and the RBA governor will be making a speech, so he'll probably be queried about the GDP.

Rudi will appear on Sky Business today at noon ? his last appearance for 2011.