The success of Joe Biden’s presidency will rely largely upon the economy

The economy, stupid”. That slogan – the prefix “it’s” came later – was written on the wall of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign office in Little Rock in 1992 by his strategist James Carville. It should ring out loud today.

The success or otherwise of Joe Biden’s presidency will turn on whether the US makes a truly successful economic recovery. Of course a vast range of other things matter: success in healing racial, cultural and political divisions are at the top of the list. But if the economy fails, everything else fails. Economic failure would bear down on every other aspect of the new administration’s policies. It would strip away resources for its programmes, but perhaps even more important it would strip away its authority. So what will happen?

There are really two dimensions to that question. The first is how well the US recovers from the economic hit of the pandemic. The second is how well the economy performs in a structural sense over the next four years.