As another leg down to the economy is starting to be telegraphed by even the official data set, particularly in unemployment, and housing, and with industrial production slowing down, Goldman is once again beating the QE 2 "non-lite" drums. As such, all eyes turn to this week's Jackson Hole Kansas City Fed Economic Symposium (the same Kansas City where the sole dissenter to the Fed's ZIRP "bubbles4eva" policy, Tom Hoenig, rules over rational thought with an iron fist, even as other Fed intellectual midgets scribble pre-paid papers describing how stable the economy of soon to be bankrupt countries is). As we pointed out in the days following Hatzius' reduction in GDP estimates, the Goldman strategist was hoping for a $1 trillion QE announcement. The Fed decided against it, and the market sold off. Which is why at this very public Fed venue (and last) before the September 21 FOMC meeting, many will be focused on Bernanke's speech to see if he will telegraph the purchases of even more securities, which as Hatzius highlighted before, could include more "exotic" credit, including private label MBS, munis and even corporates. As Sven Jari Stehn says, "it will be worth watching whether Fed Chairman Bernanke will comment in his opening remarks on the recent data disappointments and/or the ongoing debate on the appropriate stance of monetary policy." And nobody is more concerned than Angela Merkel - now that the EUR has finally started to dip once again to the delight of an insolvent Europe, Germany will do all it can to keep the USD on its upward trend, as the ECB would prove much harder to manipulate into another round of QE. Or maybe not - all it would take is for Greece to be declared bankrupt again. Which is why the next big geopolitical instability cycle may start off anew depending on the first few sentences uttered by Bernanke in the August 26-28 meeting. And finally something quite odd about this year's meeting - as Bloomberg's Scott Lanman points out, the head of the FRBNY's trading desk, better known as the PPT, Brian Sack, is not invited to this meeting for the first time. We will keep a close eye on this very peculiar regime change.

One thing is certain: the ever more clamorous disagreement between the uber-Hawk (Hoenig) and the uber-money printing advocate (Bullard) is about to reach new heights.

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