How a central bank created to exist apart from politics got drawn into bitter political arguments. In September, the European Central Bank announced that it had taken decisions on a “number of technical features regarding the Eurosystem’s outright transactions in secondary sovereign bond markets.” The ECB did all it could to make these decisions sound like a nonevent. It claimed that the new policy measures—which it gave the incomprehensible-seeming label Outright Monetary Transactions—had the dull but laudable aim of safeguarding “appropriate monetary policy transmission and the singleness of the monetary policy.” As it turns out, Outright Monetary Transactions are anything but simple “technical features.” They have scant relevance to monetary transmission or to conventional monetary policy. Instead, they allow the ECB to do something that it is not supposed to do: intervene in the market for government debt. This new tool is intended to solve an enormous political problem, and it came into being only after months of bitter political feuding. The weaker states in Europe’s single currency zone—Spain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal—have been lurching from crisis to crisis. For many months, they had repeated difficulties selling government bonds at reasonable interest rates on the open market. The ECB’s new initiative provides potentially unlimited support for these bonds—hence avoiding potentially catastrophic attacks from bond traders—but at a very high price. Members who want ECB support have to submit to a set of European Union and International Monetary Fund conditions, which will almost certainly include savage cutbacks in government spending. Even though the IMF has suggested that overly harsh austerity measures are self-defeating, it has repeatedly knuckled under to the EU’s demands.