‘This is my big worry…’
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) Speaking to Republican and Democratic officials, Harvard economist Jason Furman, a former Obama administration official, said this year will bring “the best economic data” in American history.
Furman, who chaired the council of economic advisers from 2013 until President Donald Trump’s inauguration, made that claim in early April, when lockdowns were beginning. He was not deterred from his assessment by rising unemployment and a tanking stock market, Politico reported.
“Everyone looked puzzled and thought I had misspoken,” Furman said.
His forecast is rooted in the knowledge that the economy collapsed because of forces extrinsic to the economy—like a natural disaster—whereas the Great Depression and Great Recession both occurred because of underlying economic problems.
He said the shutdown-induced economic paralysis will mirror economic trends following similar natural disasters.
After the shutdown, he said the economy will recover “very very fast, because people go back to their original job, they get called back from furlough, you put the lights back on in your business. Given how many people were furloughed and how many businesses were closed you can get a big jump out of that. It will look like a V.”
Furman said the coming economic boom would again give Trump the right to boast about being much better positioned to oversee expanding employment and wealth.
Since then, Furman has been making this case to ruling class Democratic Party officials, and some are listening.
“This is my big worry,” an unnamed, unverified former White House official said, according to Politico.
The anonymous source said the level of concern within the Democratic Party’s leadership is “high—high, high, high, high.”
Given the disparity in states’ responses to the coronavirus, the Democratic Party seems eager to carry former Vice President Joe Biden to the White House on a message of Trump’s economic failure.
An economic boom could change all of that.
“They are very much aware of this,” an anonymous adviser to Biden said.