Attack the Week (ATW)

Fantasy Football, Politics & Jackson Hole

I mentioned in Friday’s Chart Book that I’m away travelling. So here are my brief thoughts, a glance at the weekly calendar and the output of our weekly Asset Allocation Model. As always, my friend Macro D is giving his views on what can only be described as a very odd meeting in Alaska last Friday. As for charts, please take last Friday’s Chart Book Updates as the reference.

Sunday Thoughts

I’ve been playing Fantasy Premier League for a long time. That’s soccer for my American friends. Ironically, the one season I won our friends league was when I hadn’t even put any money on it, damn it. Maybe that was fitting — the purest joy of winning came when it wasn’t about the stakes, but about the game. And perhaps that says something larger about football itself, because the sport has moved so far away from what once made it matter.

The game has deteriorated into a money-making scheme where rules are bent to serve the powerful and crush the small. Crystal Palace, for example, can’t compete in Europe because of arbitrary technicalities. Yet, the big clubs with multiple open financial fair play cases continue to buy whoever they want. It reflects a more profound moral decline: players today hold more power than coaches, behaving like divas, flanked by agents, sulking their way out of clubs and refusing to play until a richer offer comes in — often from the Saudi league dangling obscene millions. Football used to be about fight, grit, and giving the fans something to believe in. Now it’s just a business with too many mercenaries. That’s why I can’t enjoy it anymore. For me, football will remain just one thing: fantasy.

And perhaps there’s a parallel to politics and central banking these days. The much-hyped Trump–Putin meeting this week was all smoke and mirrors. Trump staged his show of strength, flying B-2 bombers overhead as a not-so-subtle reminder of American power. Putin, for his part, played along in the theatre of diplomacy. Who knows what comes next?

Similarly, central banking is slowly descending into more of a fantasy than a substantiated rules-based policy-making. Do we think the much-talked-about 25 bps September rate cut would change the financial world that dramatically? It’s not the cut but what it stands for, the signal and road ahead that matters most. We will hear at Jackson Hole and Powell what’s likely to occur. Remember that monetary policy setting works in lags and should consider the macro landscape a year out from now. Do they, though? I think that’s just fantasy.

Let’s scan the weekly calendar and the output of the asset allocation model for next week.