Concluding Thoughts for 2009
Economic downturns can be an opportunity for savvy businesses to grab market share according to a story this week on NPR’s Morning Edition (click here to listen). The story notes that company market shares change more during a downturn than at any other time.
But this downturn is coming to a close. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, appearing on Meet the Press last Sunday, said that the recession probably ended in July or even in June. He went on to say that employers “presumed that the economy was going to go down far more sharply than it actually did… What this means is that we have a level of employment at this stage which is barely adequate to staff the level of output, and… it seems to me virtually inevitable that if nothing else were to happen that employment would start to come back fairly quickly.”
Alan Blinder, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, makes the same point in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal this week titled “The Case for Optimism on the Economy” (click here). He notes that “Fearful businesses pared payrolls to the bone… Which means that firms will need to hire more workers as their sales and production grow. Which means that employment may start growing sooner than the pessimists think.”
This is the 39th edition of Good News Friday. The first one came out on Friday, March 20th during the depths of the credit crisis and the recession. But we were already past the low point. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit bottom on March 9th and embarked on what turned out to be a 57 percent rally as of yesterday, while net monthly job losses had peaked at 741,000 in January and were down just about every month since then, to 11,000 last month. Problems remain, of course, but the economy proved to be far more resilient than just about anyone thought.
Courtesy of Robert Bach, SVP, Chief Economist, Grubb & Ellis.
For a free consultation of your commercial real estate needs please contact Sean Thompson at 406.539.0082 or sean.thompson@grubb-ellis.com OR Joe Cobb at 406.579.2999 or joe.cobb@grubb-ellis.com. www.MTcommercialRE.com
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