Wealth & Money Quote by Christina Romer

The line lands like a press briefing trying to cosplay as certainty. Romer piles up superlatives - "biggest, boldest", "absolutely comprehensive", "incredible medicine" - because the moment demanded not just policy but mood management. In early-crisis America, fear was a contagion; economists suddenly had to talk like campaign surrogates. The repetition ("you know", "is, is") reads less like ignorance than like live translation: an academic calibrating her language in real time for a mass audience and jittery markets.

The intent is straightforward: reassure households, investors, and legislators that the government isn’t improvising, it’s executing a plan with scale. But the subtext is the tell: "we fully expect it to work". Expect is not know. It’s a probabilistic verb dressed up as conviction, the closest an economist can get to a vow without lying. The metaphor of "medicine" is doing heavy lifting, too. Medicine implies a diagnosis, a dosage, and side effects - and, crucially, patience. It reframes fiscal stimulus as treatment rather than ideology, an attempt to pull the debate away from moral panic about spending and toward clinical necessity.

Context matters: Romer, as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Great Recession, was selling an aggressive Keynesian response in a country primed to distrust both Wall Street bailouts and Washington competence. The breathless cadence isn’t accidental; it’s urgency and defensiveness at once. She’s trying to build a narrative where the policy’s sheer magnitude becomes evidence of its inevitability. When institutions look fragile, “biggest ever” becomes a substitute for “we can prove this will be enough.”