Claudia Sahm is the Director of Macroeconomic Research at JFI. She is also the founder of Stay-at-Home Macro (SAHM) Consulting and a regular opinion writer at Bloomberg. She has policy and research expertise on consumer spending, fiscal stimulus, and the financial well-being of households. She is the author of the “Sahm Rule,” a reliable early signal of recessions that she developed as a way to automatically trigger stimulus payments to individuals in a recession. Previously, she was a section chief in the Division of Consumer and Community Affairs at the Federal Reserve Board, where she oversaw the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking. Before that she worked for ten years in the Division of Research and Statistics on the staff’s macroeconomic forecast. She was a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in 2015-2016. Sahm holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan (2007), and a bachelor’s degree in economics, political science, and German from Denison University (1998).
