Some remarks on the IMF’s latest WEO forecasts which reveal quite clearly the IMFs tendency to allow individual country forecasts to fly without undertaking global consistency checks. thegeneraltheorist.com/2020/04/27/cov…
Indeed, if you look at the current account forecasts, about 3/4 of individual country forecasts show a deteriorating external current account balance... 
And while the WEO database does not provide USD nominal GDP forecasts, we can reserve engineer numbers for 2020 to reveal that the same applied in absolute dollar terms — the global economy is projected to move into deficit in 2020z
Lining up countries by size (eliminating the smallest absolute changes) we see Ireland’s surplus is expected to increase by nearly USD60bn in 2020 — to swing from large deficit in 2019 to large surplus in 2020. But we also see smaller surpluses or larger deficits...
In Japan, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Germany etc... but there is no global offset. The aggregate change in the global current account balance in USD terms in 2020 is about USD750 billion.
This means the IMF projects the global current account discrepancy (which is an anomaly in need of explanation) to move from about USD375bn surplus to USD375bn in deficit. This will be the largest deficit discrepancy in record and the first for nearly 20 years..
A more reasonable interpretation of this not that something fundamental is going on, only that each individual country team in the IMF produces their own growth and current account forecasts, and there is no meaningful global consistency checks.
That is, the micro politics of producing particular country-level forecasts trumps the public good need for sensible globally consistent projections that can inform the policy stance.
Most worrying here is the aggregate of country team analysis sees their export performance worse than their domestic absorption. This, saving is falling more than investment globally. Alternatively, if spending were forced lower this would imply a worse growth performance...
Which is precisely why a globally consistent forecast is potentially so important and useful. But the IMF continues to engage in naive country aggregation exercises rather than global surveillance and oversight.
