Surreal economics, fiscal stimulus, and the financialization of public health: Politics of the covid-19 narrative

It’s not surprising that the extent of the US’s deficit financing is turning heads. President Biden’s $1.9 trillion deficit stimulus package comes on top of Trump’s stimulus of $2.35 trillion which doesn’t include the Federal Reserve’s estimated $4 trillion. The US Government has devoted over $6 trillion to banishing Covid-19 and economic recovery. These statistics dwarf anything in the past including the Great Depression and US participation in WWII. Calvin Woodward (2021) describes it as ‘surreal economics’ at warp speed. The only saving grace is that borrowing is cheap. Some critics with little understanding of the accumulated debt think that the current stimulus might see the US economy outpace China for the first time in 45 years (Chan, 2021).