Written By:
Ingo Winzer, President
Local Market Monitor
If
you take out the swings in inventory levels that bedevil the quarterly Gross
Domestic Product figures, you find that the US economy has been growing at a 2%
to 3% rate for the past several years; not bad, but also – and this is the
point - not improving. We’d like to think that the economy is slowly getting
better and that if we just wait long enough everything will be back to “normal”,
but what if that’s not going to happen? It’s not difficult to imagine an
economy based more on consumption and speculation and less on investment and
production. In such a situation, will owning real estate be a luxury that fewer
and fewer people can afford?
In
August, jobs were up 1.8 percent over last year, including a 4 percent increase
in construction, a 1.4 percent increase in manufacture, a 1.6 percent increase
in retail, a 3.5 percent increase in business services, a 2 percent increase in
healthcare, and a 2.8 percent increase at restaurants. Government, as usual, provided
no new jobs.
The
increase in manufacturing jobs is a small sign that factors other than labor
costs are becoming more important to manufacturers, such as political
stability, nearness to markets, and better quality control. A turn in this
sector of the economy would have very good long-term consequences.
