Policymakers must take lessons from the measures that did not work to tackle the Great Recession, as well as those that did

At the end of 2008, the newly elected President Barack Obama was facing one of the deepest economic crises in living memory. Jared Bernstein, a former member of the President’s economic team, looks at the successful and not-so-successful policy measures taken by the Obama Administration to deal with effects of the Great Recession. He writes that while 2009’s Recovery Act did help to diminish job and real GDP losses, he also argues that the government undertook fiscal consolidation too early.