The U.S. Federal Reserve Board Thursday released the economic and financial market scenarios that large financial firms will be required to use in the next round of stress tests.

The scenarios include baseline, adverse, and severely adverse scenarios, and considers 26 variables, including economic activity, unemployment, exchange rates, prices, incomes, and interest rates. For example, the severely adverse scenario includes a severe recession, a 12% unemployment rate, a 5% decline in real GDP, and equity prices falling more than 50% over the course of the recession.

The Fed notes that the adverse and severely adverse scenarios are not forecasts, but are hypothetical scenarios designed to assess the strength and resilience of financial institutions, and their ability to continue to meet the credit needs of households and businesses in stressful economic and financial environments. The baseline scenario represents expectations of private sector forecasters.

The three scenarios will be used in both required company-run stress tests and supervisory stress tests conducted by the Federal Reserve.

The Fed developed the scenarios in consultation with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. They will be using the same scenarios during the upcoming stress testing cycle for their supervised institutions.

Additionally, the Fed released a proposed policy statement describing the processes it would use to develop its stress test scenarios in future years. Comments on the policy statement are due by February 15, 2013.