When it comes to assessing the strength of the U.S. economy, observers tend to rely on comparisons to recent history. For example, Americans recently saw 27 consecutive months of unemployment below 4% — a streak unseen in the United States since the 1960s. Similarly, 2023 was arguably the best year for U.S. job creation since 1999.
But there’s also an international dimension to this.
In January, The Washington Post reported that Americans were experiencing “the world’s best recovery,” which was “outperforming all of its major trading partners.” Around the same time, an Axios report similarly noted, “The United States economy grew faster than any other large advanced economy last year — by a wide margin — and is on track to do so again in 2024.” The article added that Americans were winning the post-pandemic global economic “war.”
As 2024 approaches the halfway point, the assessments haven’t changed at all. The World Bank this week not only noted that the Biden-era economy is the world’s strongest, it also concluded that the global economy is in better shape in large part because of the United States’ recovery.
“Globally, overall things are better today than they were just four or five months ago,” Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist said. “A big part of this has to do with the resilience of the U.S. economy.” Gill’s report further credited “U.S. dynamism” with helping stabilize the economies abroad.
A Washington Post report added, “The United States is the only advanced economy growing significantly faster than the bank anticipated at the start of the year.”
Also this week, The Atlantic Rogé Karma described the U.S. economy as “the envy of the world.”
If the United States’ economy were an athlete, right now it would be peak LeBron James. If it were a pop star, it would be peak Taylor Swift. Four years ago, the pandemic temporarily brought much of the world economy to a halt. Since then, America’s economic performance has left other countries in the dust and even broken some of its own records. The growth rate is high, the unemployment rate is at historic lows, household wealth is surging, and wages are rising faster than costs, especially for the working class. There are many ways to define a good economy. America is in tremendous shape according to just about any of them.
The piece quoted Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, saying, “It’s hard to think of a time when the U.S. economy has diverged so fundamentally from its peers.”
As regular readers might recall, ahead of Election Day 2020, Donald Trump repeatedly warned the public that if Joe Biden were elected, the U.S. economy would collapse. The Republican’s rhetoric wasn’t based on anything real or substantive; he just hoped to scare voters into re-electing him.
It led the then-incumbent president to declare at the final debate of the 2020 cycle, “They say the stock market will rule if I’m elected. If he’s elected, the stock market will crash.” Around the same time, Trump also told supporters that Democratic policies would “unleash an economic disaster of epic proportions” and force the country “into depression.”
Everything he said and predicted was wrong — and Trump hasn’t even tried to explain why his predictions were so hilariously misplaced. National elections have been decided over less.