George Rebane
Nevada County’s economic prospects were the subject of a 200 person gathering this morning at the GV Holiday Inn Express. Always interested in things economic and financial, Jo Ann and I were there munching breakfast with the movers and shakers of our community – I think we were allowed in on a forged hall pass. This year’s Nevada County Economic Forecast was a worthwhile event that was hosted by Gil Mathew, President/CEO Nevada County ERC, and Judy Hess, President/CEO Citizens Bank of Northern CA. The featured speakers were Mr. Gary Zimmerman, Senior Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and Dr. David Gallo, Professor of Economics, Cal State Chico.
Gary Zimmerman took us through a detailed examination of the current financial crisis with a basket full of charts and graphs. We all learned what the recent trail of tears looked like in terms of unemployment, lending, foreclosures, GDP, ‘monetary easing’ (aka printing money), and so on. GaryZ is a knowledgeable and entertaining speaker, and not an economist who takes himself too seriously. My takeaway from his talk was a better understanding of how independent the Fed seems to be from the Obama administration and Congress viz their current plans to fix the economy. No one seems to know or even really care if they can take the ongoing and proposed nostrums coming out of Washington, and somehow map them into what effect it will have on the country’s longer term GDP. To me at least, it seems important whether our 2019 national debt is going to be the Obama predicted $22T, or something like $33T, or even $44T. Today the country appears numb to all such numbers and concerns.
After the break David Gallo, another well-educated humorist in his own right, took the podium and gave us surprisingly good news about Nevada County. DavidG runs the Center for Economic Development at Chico and is the recognized maven for things economic in northern California. I’ll blow the punch line right away – Nevada County is not doing all that badly compared to what’s happening in California and the nation. In fact, compared to the mess next door in Sacramento County, we’re soaring economically. He presented a lot of numbers to back up his assessments, and promised to let GilM have a copy of the PowerPoint so that it can be posted on the ERC site (to which RR will link). I think his most important message for Nevada County was that “we’re at the bottom” of the real estate market now, and that our “economic base has not been damaged” in any real sense by this recession.
The last event of the session was a stand-up comic who should have remained sitting down.
When the crowd dispersed, GilM invited me to meet with him, Judy Hess, and the two speakers. In the following hour we went over the main results of the presentations, dug deeper into the quality of the input data, and reviewed the analytics behind the Fed’s assessment of the economy and the CED’s ongoing monitoring of northern California county economies. (As a systems scientist I was particularly interested in how little technology transfer has taken place from my field to the area of economics.) Much of our discussion related to the work that SESF and the Sierra Economic Development District are doing with ERC in how to measure the state of Nevada County’s economy. We were happy to get some references to similar work ongoing in other northern California counties, and to involve these economists in reviewing our progress in the out-months. All in all, it was a productive meeting and an informative morning. Kudos to GilM and JudyH for putting on this event.
[28mar09 update] Dr. David Gallo just emailed me the pdf of his excellent PowerPoint presentation on the 2009 Nevada County economic forecast. Now you can delve into the details of the CED analysis. You can download the 2MB file here Download Nevada County Economic Forecast 2009.
[9apr09 update] Mr. Gary Zimmerman, Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, was kind enough to send me the complete and updated edition of the PowerPoint presentation that he presented at the posted meeting. As promised, the 1.24MB file can be downloaded here Download Zimmerman 2009-3-25 Grass Valley Conf – PRES Final 2.
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