Fed officials will be in their pre-meeting communications moratorium this week, which is just as well. Markets have settled into an uneasy calm and there’s no obvious case for policymakers to upend it.

There’s still palpable angst about… well, about everything, really, and the glaring disconnect between a “too low” VIX and vol of vol+, along with still elevated cash allocations, suggest traders aren’t as complacent as you might be inclined to believe. At the same time, the sense of panic that accompanied March’s regional bank drama has largely subsided, so no one needs to be talked off the proverbial ledge. This makes for a kind of fragile equilibrium.

The macro is ambiguous, which is actually not a bad thing for policymakers angling to squeeze in one more rate hike. You can find plenty of excuses in the data for another quarter-point increase, but you can also find excuses to telegraph an inclination to pause after that. So, there’s nothing left for officials to say ahead of the May policy gathering. It’s an opportune time to shut up, for lack of a more polite way to put it.

Bets on Fed easing in the back half of the year are stubborn, but markets are pricing some chance of another hike in June following May’s move, which is fully-priced.

So, the awkward tension between market-assigned easing odds for H2 and the Fed’s “higher for longer” mantra persists. It’s not likely to be resolved in the near-term. It’d probably take consecutive negative NFP prints to sway the Fed, and although jobless claims are rising alongside mounting layoffs, it’s hard to see the bottom falling out for the labor market anytime soon.

There’s plenty of data on offer in the US this week. Most notably, the advance read on Q1 GDP is due, and it’s expected to reflect a 2% pace of expansion. The last update on the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker was 2.5%.

The personal consumption print is seen at 4%. Recall that January found Americans indulging in the most aggressive spending spree since the last round of stimulus checks. There was a bit of a hangover in February and retail sales data for March was mixed. 24 hours after this week’s GDP release, markets will get a more granular look courtesy of personal spending data for last month, which’ll be accompanied by the PCE price updates.

As the figure above reminds you, the final revision for Q4 personal consumption was miles below+ initial market expectations. That’s ancient history, but it’s context. And context never hurts.

“Policymakers won’t have the opportunity to provide investors guidance in the event that first quarter growth materially disappoints, although such an outcome is unlikely enough as to not contribute to the market’s collective angst,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen and Ben Jeffery remarked.

More important, perhaps, than the GDP release is the Q1 ECI report, due Friday. This is the series which, according to his own retelling, prompted Jerome Powell to recalibrate his thinking on the persistence of inflation in late 2021.

Consensus expects a 1.1% headline print, still very hot by historical standards. Any material upside on the headline (or on any of the multitudinous accompanying wage and comp measures) would send a hawkish message to markets.

All of this is set against concerns that even if Fed hikes and sundry curve inversions didn’t condemn the US economy to recession, March’s bank drama surely did. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but it’s very difficult to get a read on that ahead of time. The weekly Fed release on deposits and lending comes on a 10-day lag and may still be misleading+. Even if those figures were real-time and perfect, we need to know how last month’s events are going to impact credit decisions one or two quarters down the road, which isn’t possible.

Also on the docket this week: US housing data including updates on marquee price indexes and pending home sales, GDP figures out of Europe and Kazuo Ueda’s debut as Bank of Japan governor.