“If we were back in early 2009—when we were coming to work every morning with clenched stomachs, with the economy losing 800,000 jobs a month and the Dow under 7,000—and someone said that by your last year in office, unemployment would be five percent, the deficit would be under three percent, AIG would have turned a profit and we made all our money back on the banks, that would’ve been beyond anybody’s wildest expectations,” Gene Sperling, the former director of the National Economic Council under President Obama, observed.
