ECB bank president Mario Draghi pledged last week to "do whatever it takes" to save the euro.
However, National Australia Bank head of Europe markets economics Tom Vosa said "the bazooka has yet to be fired".
"The next governing council is due to meet on September 6 and we would then expect Draghi to have put together a deal on ECB intervention while confirming what the non-standard measures are."
Normally, the ECB governing council met twice a month, with the second meeting two weeks after the first, Mr Vosa said.
There was no second meeting in August, although a teleconference could be arranged if required.
Mr Draghi had put markets on a warning that the ECB stood ready to intervene in a large way, even if bond purchases would be limited to the short end of the interest-rate curve - two- or three-year terms.
"We suspect that intervening at these parts will not only allow the ECB to more easily hold the debt to maturity, it also removes some of the obvious distortions in the Spanish curve."
Most expectations of a debt default were always over a two- or three-year horizon, as after that, the expectation was that the euro zone moved closer to full fiscal union, he said.
The fact that Spanish five-year bond yields rose after the ECB press conference would be interpreted as the bank's lack of credibility.
That would be a mistake, as higher yields would give the ECB a better entry point when it decided to enter the market, and would give the market a greater push.
"We now roughly know what the bazooka will look like and suspect that it is only a matter of time before it is fired."
As expected, the European central bank kept interest rates on hold for August, which was apparently a unanimous decision.
Mr Vosa said Mr Draghi was determined to build on his comments in London last week when he pledged to do whatever it took to save the euro.
Following the ECB press conference, the New Zealand dollar rose to a record high against the euro of 66.66 euro cents, the highest since the single currency entered circulation in 2002.
The Australian dollar fell slightly and was trading at $US104.66.
Sharemarkets on both sides of the Atlantic fell after the announcement.
On Thursday, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke kept US monetary policy unchanged, despite noting the world's biggest economy might need help.
Job data out overnight will set the tone for US markets.
According to a Bloomberg survey, employers added 100,000 new workers to their payrolls in July, up from 80,000 in June.
HiFX currency strategist Stuart Ive said if the job data was a "bad number", the kiwi could go higher.
"It will mean there is more of a chance for quantitative easing," he said.
An IMF spillover report that looks at how the economic policy of the so-called systemic five economies - the US, China, euro zone, Japan and the United Kingdom - affect each other and the rest of the world said the euro area crisis was by far the biggest concern weighing on policymakers' minds.
"Despite progress in the face of constraints, the sense is that not enough has been done to stop the spread of stresses and attenuate fiscal-growth-banking feedback loops," the IMF said of the euro zone's policy actions so far.
The IMF estimated that if the euro zone crisis intensified, the impact to the world's poorest countries would be mild to severe and could push up their external financing needs by about $US27 billion ($NZ33.2 billion) by the end of next year.
