The Federal Reserve recently announced a 75-basis-point rate hike — the largest since 1994 — in an attempt to curb inflation. The Fed's aim is to thread the needle by cooling the economy just enough to rein in rising prices without inducing a recession. But will the Fed succeed, or is a recession on the horizon? And if an economic downturn is coming, how severe will it be? To answer those questions and get a sense of where the US economy is heading, I've brought my AEI colleague Michael Strain back on Political Economy. Mike is the director of Economic Policy Studies and the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He's also the author of the 2020 book, The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).