The market has shifted to expecting 50 basis points at the next FOMC meeting. That may be the right prediction, but based on the data to date, it would be the wrong policy. Plenty of things could happen between now and September that would justify something else. But the Fed is still so far from its inflation target that it can’t afford to continue to let financial conditions ease. Better to be more aggressive now than to have a bigger problem to deal with later.

The Inflation Reduction Act, to which Sen. Joe Manchin and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed Wednesday, is what the country needs now. It will help address one of the world’s biggest long-run challenges, climate change, while making progress on inflation. At the same time it will help protect the most vulnerable by extending tax credits for healthcare.

Jason Furman speaks with NPR about his theory that the economy could be a winner for Republicans this fall. 

The Covid-19 recession started with a sudden shuttering of many businesses, a nationwide decline in consumption and massive increase in unemployment. But starting around April 15, when economic reopening started to spread but the overall numbers still looked grim, Furman noticed some data that pointed to the kind of recovery that economists often see after a hurricane or industrywide catastrophe like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Jason Furman, Scott Gottlieb, Kavita Patel, and Michael R. Strain

Among the four of us, one of us served in President Trump’s administration and two of us served in President Obama’s administration. Two of us are doctors and two of us are economists. All four of us strongly believe that one of the many critical steps Congress should take to slow the spread of the COVID-19 disease, help the families and communities most affected by it, and aid the overall economy would be to increase the federal matching rate for the Medicaid program.

Furman is a professor at Harvard University and a former economic adviser to President Barack Obama, serving both during and after the Great Recession. "I find what we're going through right now much scarier," he says. Scarier not just because of the virus, he says, but also because of the pace and potential depth of the economic meltdown it's causing.

As the United States entered Week 2 of trying to contain the spread of the coronavirus by shuttering large swaths of the economy, President Trump, Wall Street executives and many conservative economists began questioning whether the government had gone too far and should instead lift restrictions that are already inflicting deep pain on workers and businesses.

Given the mounting economic risks posed by the spread of the novel coronavirus, Congress should act swiftly but thoughtfully to pass fiscal stimulus. This would be in addition to continuing to provide ample funding for medical research, testing, prevention and treatment. The stimulus’s total cost would be about $350 billion, but could be larger or smaller depending on how the economic situation unfolds. Congress should design it to be accelerated, big, comprehensive and dynamic.