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With this commentary, we are discussing October/November 2024. The widespread belief was Biden’s Economy and it its progress over the last two years was weak. That is just false and yet the news media and Republicans made such claims and many people followed suit in belief.Yes we did have inflation, we did have supply chain issues, and corporations took advantage of it.The “is” in the title should be a “was.” The report by EPI is from October 2024 and a couple of weeks before the election. A former Consulting partner (Ted) at Ingersoll Engineers and I were talking about how strong the economy was a few weeks back.As usual, clicking on the chart will enlarge it.Seven reasons why today’s economy is historically strong, Economic Policy Institute as explained by Josh Bivens @ EPIEconomic performance looms large in every presidential election year. In 2024, people’s perception of their own economic situation is high, yet their estimation of the economy’s performance more generally has been noticeably negative. It is often taken as given in economic commentary the economy was stronger pre-pandemic. This impression is deeply mistaken.The economy today is extraordinarily strong by nearly every historical benchmark, including relative to the years immediately preceding the pandemic. Unhappiness about the economy’s performance is mostly a hangover induced by the extreme shocks and after effects of the pandemic and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. These shocks led to a pronounced “bullwhip effect”—the economy saw aggregate demand collapse which led to unemployment spiking (during the late Trump administration) and then demand snapped back as supply chains broke down which caused inflation to spike (during the early Biden administration).By the end of 2022, the shocks were largely subsiding. Their economic effects were being quickly dampened. A serious assessment of how the economy is doing today should look past these short-term bullwhip effects and focus on comparisons of the pre- and post-shock “normal.”The table at the bottom of this post compares economic performance along a range of measures across three time periods. The end of 2022, the last full business cycle before the pandemic (2007–2019), and between 2017–2019. The tail end of that business cycle’s expansion that coincided with the Trump administration  before the damaging pandemic effects were felt.Compared with the other two periods, the second half of the Biden administration has seen pronouncedeconomic strength. Each indicator is summarized below:

The only measure where things look a bit worse than in previous periods is the average level of inflation since the end of 2022. But the time since 2022 has also seen a historically rapid deceleration of inflation—far faster than in any previous period. In short, inflation over the past 20 months is the rapidly fading end of the shocks of the early 2020s. More By This Author:Crude Oil Reserves FallSome Explanation For The Deficits – Quit Cutting Taxes The Highest Earners Have Amassed A Growing Share Of Total Wages