See if you can spot the point where the stimulus began. (Jeffrey
Frankel)  Amazingly, there are still some holdouts in the
political and economic community who insist that the Obama
stimulus failed--that is, failed to arrest a steep fall in
economic output and launch a period of growth in gross domestic
product, jobs, stock market valuations, and other metrics that
continues to this day.  Menzie Chinn of the University of
Wisconsin and Jeffrey Frankel of Harvard (and a former Clinton
administration economics advisor) have just ganged up on the
stimulus deniers. Their analyses are timely, since the stimulus
has just passed its fifth birthday: The American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act was signed into law on Feb. 17, 2009.  Chinn
observes (and shows his work via a series of telling slides)
that the launch of ARRA coincides almost exactly with the
bottoming out of the stock market, the reversal of a trend of
increasing negative GDP growth and an almost unbroken record of
positive growth since the end of the firs