A top Federal Reserve official said Wednesday that the inability of the U.S. to control the coronavirus pandemic limited the benefit of trillions in fiscal stimulus approved by President Trump and Congress earlier this year, The Hill reported. Eric Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said yesterday that the abrupt peel-back of restrictions imposed to slow the pandemic in the U.S. prevented record-breaking economic rescue efforts from fostering a quick recovery. “Normally with the kind of stimulus that we've seen with both fiscal policy and monetary policy, you'd actually expect a V-shaped recovery,” Rosengren said, referring to an immediate economic recovery from a downturn of similar speed and scale. “The reason we're not seeing a V-shaped recovery and that we're seeing a pause right now is that it's very hard for fiscal or monetary policy to offset a public health concern," he continued. Rosengren is the latest in a series of top Fed officials — including Fed Chairman Jerome Powell — to stress the importance of vigorous coronavirus control measures to a full recovery from the pandemic-driven recession. The onset of the pandemic prompted the quickest and deepest economic collapse in U.S. history. While the unemployment rate has since fallen from a post-Great Depression high of 14.7 percent in April to 10.2 percent in July, the second wave of coronavirus cases drastically slowed the pace of the recovery that began in May.
