Recent statements by ECB Governing Council members Bini Smaghi and Weber and by Fed Chairman Bernanke provide some interesting food for thoughts on central banks’ current response to the crisis and the next move.

The real economy continues to provide a seemingly endless stream of disappointments: today we learnt that UK industrial production contracted by 2.6% in January, more than twice as much as expected (1.2% consensus), and bringing the year on year rate to -11.4%. Industrial production and exports are recording double-digit contractions in most industrial countries, painting an increasingly worrisome picture, and casting more and more doubts on the prospects of a recovery by the end of the year.

This growing pessimism provides a particularly adverse background for economic policymaking: there is enormous pressure on governments and central banks to pull all stops to halt the recession, while a spreading feeling of hopelessness causes markets to react with skepticism to each new policy action. Policy measures end up being blunted by the same lack of confidence that makes them necessary in the first place.

Policymakers are correspondingly left wondering whether they will ever be doing enough, and whether they are already at risk of doing too much, sowing the seeds of the next crisis.

In the US, the Fed and the new Administration seem to have concluded that there is no such thing as “too much”, at least for the moment. In a speech delivered today by Fed Chairman Bernanke, the emphasis on how to prevent future crisis fell therefore on a reform of the global financial architecture. In Bernanke’s speech, this starts from an open and candid admission of the failures in US regulation, supervision and risk management of the last several years. Bernanke goes so far as pointing out that while the global macro imbalances that contributed to the crisis where a shared responsibility, the US bears the blame for having mismanaged the massive inflows of foreign savings in much the same way as some emerging markets did in the 1990s.

In the Eurozone, policymakers are instead still carefully weighing the risks of excessive policy stimulus. Today ECB’s Weber made it clear that he sees 1.0% as the floor for the refi rate, and as my colleague Aurelio Maccario argued in his note earlier today, this is probably the majority view within the Governing Council.