But there were times when they lined up center stage, turning from side to side and stretching their arms as if carefully signaling in a private gestural language.
In his first interview since his appointment, new programming ideas tumble out, shifts of nuance are carefully signalled and his passion for his new role shines through.
But the Fed, wary of surprising markets, has once again fallen into a pattern of carefully signaling each rate hike — and markets, once again, are largely unconcerned.
Today, Hamas members carefully signaled their willingness to halt attacks on Israeli civilians, at least temporarily, as new American monitors visited Palestinian leaders for the first time and the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, met with the militant groups.
Perhaps because I had just spent the last month covering 4,000 miles as I carefully signaled lane changes, making judicious use of cruise control and mainlining caffeine just to avoid accidents.
Jones points out that a US rate rise, even if carefully signalled in advance, could have knock-on effects in some emerging countries that have been borrowing at low interest rates in dollars since the crisis.
West led the spade king, thinking that she might need to hold the lead and make a telling shift at Trick 2. Then East, who knew from the auction that South had the club king, carefully signaled with her ten, the high card asking for a shift to the higher-ranking of the other two side suits, hearts.
Mr. Bernanke, who spent most of his career as a professor at Princeton and who favors a steady rules-based approach to monetary policy, has nonetheless carefully signaled that the Fed would not necessarily wait to act until it had irrefutable evidence of a looming downturn.
The investment slowdown is a part of a deliberate and carefully signalled policy by China's president, Xi Jinping, to shift growth away from the export-dominated model that brought more than a decade of double-digit growth rates, as China exploited cheap labour to become the undisputed workshop of the world.
Meanwhile, Federal Reserve policymakers will have to decide in the coming days whether to stick to their carefully signalled plan to push up America's interest rates at their next policy meeting on 17 September, in the face of growing fears about a Chinese slowdown.
