Highlighted here is General Motors Corp. (GM). The minutes of the Fed meeting of late April were released. They show that the staff economists there had cut their economic outlooks relative to January, but are still relatively upbeat. If the three most optimistic and the three most pessimistic forecasts are excluded (what the Fed terms the Central Tendency), then the range of GDP growth forecasts for 2009 is from -2.0% to -1.3%. This marks a significant downgrade from January, when the central tendency forecasts ranged from -1.5% to -0.5%. Considering that in the first quarter the economy fell at an annualized rate of 6.1%, even the pessimistic end of the forecasts implies that we will have a near-term recovery. Down at an 6.1% rate means that the economy has already contracted by 1.5% this year, so we would ...