The IMF did it again! Next year is always better than this year. It's not easy for humans to climb aboard the clue train.

Those numbers, though, are heading lower and could be revised even more before all is said and done...

The $73.5 trillion global economy is expected to grow 3.1 percent in 2015 and 3.6 percent in 2016, according to the latest International Monetary Fund projections .

And what are the latest growth projections of the IMF? CNBC gives us the numbers .

As a result, the fund is now doing some head-scratching in order to determine whether this persistently weaker than predicted performance is a temporary phenomenon caused by a particularly deep recession or something more permanent.

That’s a chunky forecasting error, especially in the light of all the factors that should have been boosting activity – interest rates at all-but zero, oodles of money creation through quantitative easing programs and, more recently, tumbling oil prices.

Rather, it is because the global economy continues to under-perform. Every year, economists at the fund predict that recovery is about to move up a gear, and every year they are disappointed. The IMF has over-estimated global growth by one percentage point a year on average for the past four years.

The International Monetary Fund is worried. That’s not just because it has shaved its growth forecast for 2015 for the second time in six months. It is not even that the world economy is expected this year to post its weakest performance since it completely stalled in 2009.

A few people are talking about it—I'll get to them in moment—but nobody seems to care, at least in the United States. Let's start with those puzzled optimists at the IMF .

The global economy is teetering on the brink of recession, or maybe it's already in recession.

A global recession is not like a recession in a specific country, as CNBC explains.

On a global scale, though, the [recession] standard is different. Absolute growth less than 3 percent, or GDP adjusted for market exchange rates below 2 percent, is generally good enough to call a recession. By either measure, the world is teetering on the line, with 2015 adjusted growth pegged at 2.5 percent and 2016 at 3 percent.

And in my humble opinion, if the IMF is taking China's official growth numbers at face value, then the global economy is likely already in recession according to the common definition (Financial Times, September 28, 2015). This sentence in the FT report is priceless.

For China and other governments for whom economic growth is the main guarantee of political legitimacy, the temptation to fudge will always exist.

The temptation to fudge? Oh, my! Did I mention the clue train?

Getting back to the IMF, and pardon me for pointing this out, but it seems that 2015 is looking very shaky and 2016 hasn't happened yet. One might think that 2016 projections would be influenced by 2015 performance, but this is Homo sapiens we're talking about here. Flatland strikes again

Here in the United States, all debate about the sad state of the global economy is entirely overshadowed by Hillary Clinton's e-mail server, Donald Trump's latest gaff and other trivia. And yet, right there in The Washington Post, Larry Summers, who might have been our new Fed chairman, writes that The global economy is in serious danger. Serious danger!

As the world’s financial policymakers convene for their annual meeting Friday in Peru, the dangers facing the global economy are more severe than at any time since the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008. The problem of secular stagnation — the inability of the industrial world to grow at satisfactory rates even with very loose monetary policies — is growing worse in the wake of problems in most big emerging markets, starting with China. This raises the specter of a global vicious cycle in which slow growth in industrial countries hurts emerging markets, thereby slowing Western growth further. Industrialized economies that are barely running above stall speed can ill afford a negative global shock. Policymakers badly underestimate the risks of both a return to recession in the West and of a period where global growth is unacceptably slow, a global growth recession.

Right. See the IMF, above. And what if a recession occurs? (Or, has already occurred?)

If a recession were to occur, monetary policymakers would lack the tools to respond. There is essentially no room left for easing in the industrial world. Interest rates are expected to remain very low almost permanently in Japan and Europe and to rise only very slowly in the United States. Today’s challenges call for a clear global commitment to the acceleration of growth as the main goal of macroeconomic policy. Action cannot be confined to monetary policy.

For more details, look at Larry's editorial. However, I do want to point out Larry's nice Flatland observation.

There is an old proverb: “You do not want to know the things you can get used to.”

Well done, Mr. Summers! See the discussion of boiling frogs, shifting baselines, etc. in the second Flatland essay.

It is all too applicable to the global economy in recent years.

Right, that's what this post is all about. Larry explains.

While the talk has been of recovery and putting the economic crisis behind us, gross domestic product forecasts have been revised sharply downward almost everywhere. Relative to its 2012 forecasts, the International Monetary Fund has reduced its forecasts for U.S. GDP in 2020 by 6 percent, for Europe by 3 percent, for China by 14 percent, for emerging markets by 10 percent and for the world as a whole by 6 percent. These dismal figures assume there will be no recessions in the industrial world and an absence of systemic crises in the developing world. Neither can be taken for granted.

One would think, a mere seven years after a global economic meltdown, that humans would be hyper-alert to the risk of another such event. Larry didn't say the global economy is in danger; he said it was in serious danger.

And it is.

But here we are, in 2015, whistling past the graveyard. That's Larry's point and mine, too. And David Stockman's point (graph below).

Unfortunately, optimistic complacency is the natural state of Homo sapiens. Those IMF economists should be worried, but don't know the half of it. Keep revising those growth numbers down, boys, one day you're sure to be right.

There's some "good news" in all this—when the global economy stalls out and remains stagnant for many years to come, governments and environmentalists will take credit for getting us off the BAU emissions path. They will talk about per-capita emissions and the carbon intensity of growth and lots of other meaningless shit.

But we will be "saved" because the global economy sucks and will suck, not because of anything humans did to avert climate catastrophe. Homo sapiens—delusional to the end.