Bloomberg is report­ing, and Drudge is blar­ing, that Ital­ian Prime Min­is­ter Silvio Berlus­coni dis­cussed a plan by the world’s polit­i­cal lead­ers to sus­pend the finan­cial mar­kets and “rewrite the rules of inter­na­tional finance.” Which would obvi­ously be rather fright­en­ing, on many levels, if it were true. But as far as I can tell, it simply isn’t.

Lay this one at the feet of Il Coglione him­self. Five min­utes after he spoke of the sup­posed plan, he was forced to admit: “Someone advanced the hypoth­e­sis of rewrit­ing the rules. We were only talk­ing about it, but there’s noth­ing yet.”

An hour later, Pier­luigi Bersani, Italy’s shadow min­is­ter of the econ­omy, said, “We already have enough prob­lems with­out Berlus­coni adding others. To speak of sus­pend­ing the mar­kets, and then, after just three min­utes, to con­fus­edly take back what you just said only adds uncer­tainty to uncertainty.”

And sure enough, it turns out that by “someone” Berlus­coni meant “someone on the radio”:

“I heard it on the radio,” Berlus­coni said about an hour after his ini­tial com­ments, his spokesman con­firmed. “The hypoth­e­sis wasn’t put for­ward by any leader, includ­ing myself.”

This morn­ing, White House spokesman Tony Fratto denied that any such plan had ever been discussed.