I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: IMF growth updates are a paradox of sorts.

There’s a sense in which we should all care what the world’s foremost multilateral economic institution has to say about the outlook for the global economy. But the irony of IMF projections is that almost no one cares, despite the fact that the Fund’s forecasts are, in one way or another, built into lending deliberations and other decisions with the potential to make or break entire economies.

With that in mind, Tuesday’s update was guaranteed to come and go with virtually nothing in the way of fanfare, but I felt compelled to at least acknowledge it. The Fund made minor adjustments to its forecasts for global growth, which will be 3% this year, compared to the 2.8% projection released in April. The 2024 forecast (also 3%) was left unchanged.

For advanced economies, the Fund lifted its outlook slightly, to 1.5% and 1.4% for 2023 and 2024, respectively. Emerging markets will growth 4% this year and 4.1% next, according to the new forecasts.

I’m not going to lie to you: These tweaks are completely meaningless. That’s not to say there weren’t some notable highlights from the update (which I get to below), it’s just to say there’s no market read-through whatsoever from small adjustments to the IMF’s outlook for growth.

Now to the notables. Germany is the only advanced nation that’s expected to see a contraction this year.

The world’s fourth-largest economy is mired in a multi-faceted slump centered around manufacturing. PMIs for July were bad, and the Ifo gauge fell a third month, data released on Tuesday showed.

Germany suffered a recession over the winter, and by appearances anyway, the downturn is ongoing.

“It looks like the German economy is really having a hard time getting out of this recession,” Ifo’s Clemens Fuest, a reliable source of quotables, told Bloomberg TV.

It does indeed look that way. “Another drop in Germany’s most prominent leading indicator confirms that the economy is back on a downward trend before any upward trend had actually started,” ING’s Carsten Brzeski said Tuesday, editorializing around the Ifo prints on the way to describing the situation as a “slowcession.”

Germany, Brzeski mused, is “stuck in the twilight zone between stagnation and recession.”

That’s not a good place to be, and it’s predictably bolstering the electoral prospects of the far-right. I’d (very) gently note that if there’s anywhere in the world you don’t want to see a far-right resurgence, it’s Germany.

“I distance myself categorically from what happened during the Third Reich and find the constant historical comparison a rather difficult one,” Kristin Brinker, AfD’s party chair in Berlin told NPR this month. (Yes, Kristin, it is “rather difficult.” And not just for you.)

The other notable from the IMF update was a big downgrade for Saudi Arabia’s outlook. The Kingdom’s economy is seen expanding just 1.9% this year, down from a projected 3.1% in April.

Oil exports were the lowest in 20 months as of May. The Saudis are cutting supplies to the global oil market in a bid to support prices. That’s a gamble. If it works, great. If not, you look like an idiot: You’re wittingly undercutting your fiscal position with nothing to show for it.

Riyadh pretends it can manipulate oil prices the same way the Fed can set interest rates, but that’s obviously not true. And there’s some irony in the comparison: Higher rates can curb economic activity and thereby reduce demand for crude. To the extent you succeed in driving up prices, you might well precipitate more rate hikes.

Coming quickly back to the IMF’s updated assessment, the release was accompanied by the usual litany of cautious remarks. “While some adverse risks have moderated, the balance remains tilted to the downside,” the Fund warned. “Hopefully, with inflation starting to recede, we have entered the final stage of the inflationary cycle that started in 2021. But hope is not a policy.”