What has Joe Biden achieved?

Joe Biden will be remembered for an industrial strategy centred on green energy and technology – along with further protectionism

President Joe Biden answers reporters' questions after announcing the release of prisoners freed by Russia
(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla / Staff)

Stock market falls, which came just days after Joe Biden claimed he had “cured” America’s economic woes, are a timely reminder that all economic judgements are provisional, and that forecasts – including those relating to presidential legacies – can be wrong. In part, the turbulence was prompted by renewed fears of a US downturn.  

Nevertheless, there is no doubt the US economy is in surprisingly good shape compared with the Covid-wracked one inherited by Biden in January 2021. Adam Tooze, the economic historian, stresses that alone among the big global economies, the US is back to its pre-Covid trend rate of growth, and also back to its growth rate in the 2000s pre-global financial crisis.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.