Harding inherited an absentee presidency [Wilson had been incapacitated by a stroke for the last 17 months of his second term] and one of the sharpest recessions in American history. By July 1921 it was all over and the economy was booming again. Harding had done nothing except cut government expenditure, the last time a major industrial power treated a recession by classic laissez-faire methods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level. Benjamin Anderson of Chase Manhattan was later to call it ‘our last natural recovery to full employment.’ But the cuts were important. Indeed, Harding can be described as the only president in American history who actually brought about massive cuts in government spending, producing nearly a 40 per cent saving over Wilsonian peacetime expenditure.

– Paul Johnson, “The Last Arcadia” in Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties