As US president Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress ploughed ahead with their plan to pass a $1.9tn fiscal stimulus bill this week, they faced a sudden, unwelcome roadblock from within their own political sphere.

Lawrence Summers, who served as Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary and Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, warned that Biden’s plan was excessive and that it might trigger “inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability”.

Summers’ scepticism, delivered in a Washington Post op-ed on Thursday, clashed with the nearly universal backing among left-leaning economists for Biden’s argument that the US needed to “go big” with massive government support to tackle the still-raging pandemic.