Wealth & Money Quote by Christina Romer

The tell here is the careful stacking of adverbs: quickly, efficiently, transparently. Romer is doing more than defending a number; she is building a moral alibi for an enormous act of state. In early-crisis Washington, speed reads as competence, efficiency reads as seriousness, transparency reads as innocence. Put together, they’re meant to launder the most politically vulnerable part of stimulus policy: that in a recession, the government is deliberately choosing to spend first and argue later.

The phrase “Where we’re coming down” signals an insider negotiation that’s already happened offstage. It frames the $787 billion not as an ideological bet but as a settled landing point, the product of triangulation between economists, legislators, and public fear. “That’s been passed” is equally strategic: the fight is over, the clock has started, and the administration wants to shift the story from partisan brawl to execution.

Romer’s intent is to reassure multiple audiences at once. To markets and macro-watchers: we accept the Keynesian logic that timeliness matters, so the money must move. To skeptical voters: we hear your anxiety about waste, hence “efficiently” and “transparently.” To Congress and agencies: don’t bottleneck this with perfectionism.

The subtext is a balancing act between two critiques that pull in opposite directions: spend too slowly and the stimulus “fails”; spend too fast and you invite scandal. By insisting it’s “absolutely the right strategy,” Romer isn’t claiming certainty about the future. She’s trying to make decisiveness itself the evidence of sound economics, and to preempt the coming hindsight war over what a crisis “should” have cost.