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Illustration: Patrick McQuade

He saved the economy from total disaster.

Though the economic picture is by no means rosy now, it was far worse two years ago. The six months between October 2008 and March 2009, which coincided with Obama’s election and inauguration, were the economy’s lowest point in the post–World War II era. The GDP was shrinking at a 9 percent rate, and the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month.

By bailing out the Wall Street banks and the auto industry, and signing the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Obama prevented a second Great Depression, says Austan Goolsbee, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in Obama’s Cabinet from 2010 to 2011, and has since returned to his job as an economics professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

“I believe that historians are going to look back and say, ‘We were really close to going into a depression and having a collapse of the entire financial system, and we didn’t have that,’ and I believe they will look back and say that was quite an achievement that we didn’t,” Goolsbee says.