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Where’s My Recovery? (Canadian Edition)
As we have been highlighting here on the blog and in our forecasts, there are currently two major headwinds facing the recovery: housing and government. Not wanting to rehash the previous arguments...
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Where’s My Recovery?
Apologies for the dormant blog in the past few weeks. We’re busy working on the upcoming forecast – released Tuesday, May 22nd – and presentations for the Pacific Northwest Regional Economic Conference...
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Update on Housing
I will be giving a presentation to a group of Willamette Valley realtors next week, which provides an opportunity to update some of our real estate and construction related slides. Below is a summary...
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Seasonal Adjustment / Factors
A topic of conversation that continues to be an issue is that of seasonal adjustment. Did the U.S. economy really add 163,000 jobs last month or was it a loss of over 1.2 million? Well, technically,...
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Food for Thought: Optimism and Intel
Almost everyone expects the recovery to remain lackluster into at least the middle of next year. However, a growing number of economic forecasters are becoming more optimistic over the medium term (2-5...
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Leading Indicators
The Oregon Index of Leading Indicators continues to be negative on a six month basis, registering an annualized -2.1% change in September, the same figure as in August. However, these negative values...
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Construction: Employment and Starts
One particular topic that has been gaining attention on the housing recovery is the relative lack of new construction jobs even with housing starts increasing substantially. After the recent revisions...
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More on Construction Employment
Just to tie up a few loose ends here, and as the conversation continues to evolve both in Oregon and at the national level, the following takes a look at employment and hours worked. After the recent...
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Signs of Life
The 2012q4 QCEW data was just released the other day by the Employment Department and as regular readers know, this data is very useful in terms of gauging future employment revisions. As has been the...
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Seasonal Housing
Busy around here with putting together the upcoming May forecast – to be released Friday, May 16th – so not as much time for blogging lately but hopefully some more in a week or so. One item I’ve been...
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Housing Demand (Demographics)
This week I will have a three part series on housing which touches on a few different aspects of the industry and its impact on the economy. What follows is Part 1 which takes a look at the underlying...
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Housing and Related Industries
In case you missed it, Part 1 of this series looked at housing demand fundamentals and demographics and Part 2 examined housing affordability. Today in Part 3 I will introduce a new-to-me-at-least and...
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Educational Attainment
Last week I highlighted a somewhat new way of examining underemployment in the labor market and the so-called broken job ladder. In the comments it was suggested you can look at the educational...
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Quick Housing Update
Just a few graphs for an update on housing. Now that the federal websites are back up and running (hooray, data!) I am able to pull the latest permit data from around the state. Overall we have seen...
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Portland Polarization Maps
When doing any research project, many interesting parts end up getting left on the cutting room floor. Our office’s Job Polarization in Oregon report is no different. One very intriguing item that was...
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Salem Polarization Maps
Back by popular demand, and a request from our friends at The Statesman Journal (see the article for more info), below are job polarization maps of the Salem region. Just like the Portland Maps...
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Geography, A Source of Growth?
Many economists and forecasters — including the Fed — have been calling for an acceleration in growth over the next year or so, for each of the past three years. This view largely rests on the obvious...
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Regions, an Update
With the latest employment data bringing 2013 to an end, I wanted to take stock of where the state is in recovery and relative to pre-recession levels. Today we take a look at the regions within Oregon...
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Industries, An Update
Yesterday we took stock of Oregon’s regions across the state and how they compare at the end of 2013. Today we take a quick look at Oregon’s industries. Just a reminder that I allowed the pre-recession...
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Severe Recessions in Oregon
Right now the Oregon economy continues to improve and is even a bit above our office’s forecast. As we continue to work on the next outlook, it can be useful to look back and compare business cycles to...
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