Michael R. Strain, Columnist

Will the Stimulus Work? Watch These 3 Metrics

Focus on inflation expectations, monthly payrolls and core CPE to tell whether the U.S. economy is recovering from the pandemic safely.

March 12, 2021 at 5:09 PM UTC

By Michael R. Strain

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

The experiment is underway.
Photographer: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

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President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief and stimulus bill sets the U.S. off on a great economic experiment.

It will test how much fiscal stimulus the U.S. economy can absorb after a year of pandemic anxiety, social distancing and lockdowns, when households are sitting on a pile of cash that they are eager to spend while seeing friends and family, and with output rising and unemployment falling.