WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden has inherited a badly damaged economy pulverized by the pandemic, with 10 million fewer jobs than a year ago and as many as one in 6 small businesses shut down.Yet there are also signs of resilience and recovery that suggest the prospect of a rebound, perhaps a robust one, by the second half of his first year in office.
Despite the bleakness of the economic landscape, Biden by most accounts faces a less daunting challenge than he confronted as vice president under Barack Obama more than a decade ago in the depths of the Great Recession.
The hardships inflicted by the pandemic recession have been deep but concentrated in a few extremely hard-hit sectors and harshly unequal.