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Notes -
Comparing 2008 and 2020 it seems like there's a clear policy choice whether an economic shock shows up as inflation or unemployment. In 2008 the bottom of the labor market took a massive hit, but people who kept their jobs could pick up assets cheap. In 2020 massive stimulus has kept the bottom decile of the labor market up and kept unemployment quite low, it created a surge in asset prices and has driven down real income for the top decile.
There's a top bottom trade off but it also seems like we should try really hard to do the right amount of stimulus. The deficit panic post-2008 kept the economy way under-stimulated, and the second round of COVID stimulus was probably way too much. There's also a lot of partisan politics that get in the way, Republicans really didn't want Obama to be able to stimulate. Biden campaigned on a bunch of stimulus because the Democrat can't do less stimulus than Trump. Some sort of pre-commitment to automatic stabilizers pegged to the unemployment rate seems ideal.
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