Narayana Kocherlakota, Columnist

The Case for Stimulus, in Three Charts

If the economy isn't running at capacity, the government should help get it there.

May 31, 2016 at 11:00 AM UTC

Narayana Kocherlakota is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester and was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 2009 to 2015.

Needs lift.
Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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After seven years of growth, there are still signs that the U.S. economy isn’t running at full capacity. It's a problem that the Federal Reserve and Congress can and should address.

The expansion that began in mid-2009 has fallen far short of expectations. As of the end of 2015, inflation-adjusted gross domestic product was about 8 percent lower than the Congressional Budget Office predicted in August 2009, and 10 percent lower than what Federal Reserve staff forecast in November 2009.