Joe Biden's US$1.9 trillion stimulus won't be enough to reignite world economy on its own

By Michael Kitson, University Senior Lecturer in International Macroeconomics, Cambridge Judge Business School

The economic orthodoxy has long been that governments should try to balance their books and leave all the heavy lifting in managing their economies to central banks. We saw this writ large in the years after the financial crisis of 2007-09, as most major powers pursued austerity while their central banks slashed interest rates and announced successive rounds of quantitative easing (AKA printing money).

Yet this orthodoxy has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and now President Joe Biden’s US$1.9 trillion (£1.4 trillion) stimulus package has buried it. The reality

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