Sorry, the Economic Crisis Is Over

It’s getting harder for the Biden Administration to claim we’re in an economic crisis that demands more spending. It’s closer to the truth to say the economy is growing in a way that calls for spending and monetary restraint.

The latest evidence arrived Monday with the Institute for Supply Management’s news that its March survey for service businesses hit 63.7. That’s an all-time high, and it signifies rapid growth and optimism. The only problem is that many businesses say they can’t find enough workers or supplies to meet their order books.

That follows Friday’s blowout employment report for March, with a net total of 1.07 million new jobs including revisions from the previous two months. Wage gains were bigger than they looked at first glance, given that many returning workers were those in lower-wage services jobs hurt by the pandemic.

Other economic signals confirm that the economy is set to soar this year if new strains of Covid-19 don’t defeat the vaccines and the politicians don’t do anything dumb. The bottom of the recession may have been as early as last April, and the economy has been growing for at least nine months.

All of this casts more doubt about the Federal Reserve’s super-accommodative monetary policy. It also makes President Biden’s new $4 billion spending plan a case of needless excess, but then a non-crisis is a harder thing to exploit. The longer he can pretend we’re still in crisis, the less chance voters will catch on that this recovery has nothing to do with Bidenomics and was inevitable once the pandemic eased.