Claim: Biden claimed that the U.S. economy was on the brink of disaster when he took office.
“I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now our economy is the envy of the world!” Biden said.
Verdict: False.
President Biden inherited an economy that was strongly rebounding from the pandemic. In the fourth quarter of 2020, the economy grew at an annual rate of 4.3 percent.
In the prior quarter, it had grown at an annual rate of 33.1 percent, as the economy whipsawed from lockdown to reopening.
As Biden took office, in the first quarter of 2021, the economy was growing at a 5.2 percent annual rate. (Until the Department of Commerce revised its calculations last fall, this was reported as an annual rate of 6.3 percent.)
The unemployment rate was 6.4 percent in January 2021, down from 14.8 percent in April 2020. While elevated compared with recent levels and the Trump era, that is not particularly high by historical measures. When Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012, the unemployment rate was 7.7 percent.