Skipping the usual March projections, what with the FOMC totally occupied at the time by a complete global monetary meltdown Jay Powell now says "we saw it coming", the central bank staff released the calculations performed by its DSGE prodigy concurrent with today's policy meeting.

According to these simulations, the US economy will contract by somewhere between 5.5% and 7.6% for all of 2020 and then rebound by hopefully 4.5% if not 6.0% in 2021. The median forecast, to make things simple, calls for -6.5% this year followed by +5.0% next year.

And that places the Fed's projections out in front of everyone else's, not that it means anything.

Each and every one of these continues to look the same. The most optimistic forecasts, the FOMC's, are not categorically different from the rest. The uncertainty pertains instead to estimates for just how bad off we might be by the end of next year; there's no debating the massive economic damage already done.

This "V" everyone is talking about and hoping for keeps coming up conspicuously light on the right. Only a partial comeback which will almost certainly leave the world to deal with the fallout from years of underperformance – following more than a decade of unacknowledged and unexplained underperformance already.

But, QE or something.

These statistical simulations already assume "stimulus" is, has been, and will continue to be tremendously helpful. In addition to all their biases and unrealistic premises, as noted yesterday, underlying each and every one of these sets of projections, especially the Fed's, is the unproven (to put it kindly; in empirical reality these are disproved ten times over across every part of the planet) assumption monetary policy is some kind of miracle drug.

If only in terms of "jobs saved."

Before Jay Powell got on TV last week to talk a lot about how helpful the Fed can be, and how the biggest risk in his lurid liar's mind must be interest rates exploding higher, the OECD had already put out its own forward-looking estimates. Even though you may not have seen this particular set, you've already seen them many times before recently.

The V's very light on the right.