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Macroeconomic Stabilization during the Pandemic At the onset of the pandemic, the loss of jobs and income threatened hardship for millions of families and bankruptcies for small businesses. The Public Sector's Role in Economic Growth | 29 A massive public policy response likely prevented the pandemic's public health crisis from creating a prolonged and spiraling economic one. The government provided the equivalent of an economy-wide insur- ance policy against the pandemic with expanded unemployment insurance, support for temporarily shuttered businesses, aid to State and local govern- ments, and Economic Impact Payments (EIPs, which were often referred to as "stimulus checks"). This response, as former Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer argued in a recent paper with David Romer, can be thought of as roughly enacting the "pandemic insurance" policy that families and businesses would have wanted to buy themselves, if such insur- ance had existed (Romer and Romer 2021). Although there has been a larger public focus on discretionary fiscal policies like EIPs, much of what the government "did" to prevent a cata- strophic pandemic-induced economic crisis happened without Congress or the executive branch taking any affirmative action, through a set of policies known as "automatic stabilizers." For instance, when workers are laid off, they can file for unemployment benefits and can typically collect up to 26 weeks of assistance as they search for work. Such spending eases those workers' hardships and, when many workers lose their jobs at once (as in a recession), has a macroeconomic impact of preventing a cascading decline in income and spending (Kekre 2021). In crises, a program called Extended Benefits automatically adds weeks in certain states when the unemployment rate reaches certain metrics. As discussed in box 1-1, Congress did take important actions to make unemployment insurance (UI) more generous and more widely available during the pandemic, reflecting weaknesses in the current system, but some of the UI system would have been triggered with- out Congressional action. For instance, almost 25 percent of the increase in UI payments in 2020 relative to 2019 was due to "normal" UI programs (regular benefits and extended benefits). Though this increase may not have been enough to support workers during the pandemic, or even amid a normal recession, it does speak to the importance of ensuring that future policy includes robust "automatic stabilizers." Monetary policies adopted by the U.S. Federal Reserve System also play a crucial role in macroeconomic stabilization. As reviewed in a recent paper by former Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida and coauthors Bureu Duygan-Bump and Chiara Scotti (2021), the Fed's efforts to halt and reverse the economic crisis sparked by the pandemic took several forms. First, the Fed implemented its conventional policy toolkit with unprecedented speed. It cut its benchmark nominal interest rate to zero, provided forward guidance that its zero-rate policy would remain until "the economy has weathered recent events and is on track to achieve its maximum employment and price stability goals," and announced $700 billion in asset purchases of U.S. Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities