What I love about sports is that everything is black and white. You can't pretend to be something that you are not. You win or lose based on your abilities and performance. When it comes to team sports it is the star of the team who usually garners most of the attention. Yet a team is only as good as its weakest link, so members of the very best teams work together seamlessly to support each other in a way that optimizes the team's overall performance.
Coaches play a critical role in this capacity because they develop the strengths, neutralize the weaknesses, assign players to certain positions and formulate a strategy that achieves success. Ron Rivera and the Carolina Panthers embody this success to perfection, as their 15-1 record and Super Bowl appearance clearly shows. If unsuccessful in this endeavor, then the team loses and the coach is ultimately dismissed for a new one. That's as black and white as it gets.
I wish the global game of central banking operated in the same way as professional sports. Sadly, it does not, despite the fact that both operate on the basis of economics. In the spirit of Super Bowl 50, here is an update on the performance of our central bank coaching staff and its stewardship of team USA, otherwise known as the US economy.
It is nearing the end of the fourth quarter in an economic expansion that is losing strength by the day as the incoming data routinely falls below consensus estimates and the year-over-year comparisons continue to weaken. Even the coaching staff's star player, the US stock market (NYSEARCA:SPY), is starting to fatigue. There are only three plays left to run in an effort to turn this expansion around, with two of them being suboptimal at this point.
