dollars and sixty five cents in west coast cash apparently you have to ask them why it is exactly that amount but to get tickets out get ready i will do a fair balance for each year into the nine million in assets we also have a very strong wealth management group that handles investments for one case in the lakes we manage about five billions of but a big player here also in the state of michigan a lot of things that we're very proud of the bank is also very community community orientated we have local leadership in each market we have look and local decision makers and we also have to buy three boards in all our markets things that in donations and also don't mean time with employees and various nonprofit organizations or the state our big usually is open on the federal holidays except columbus day last october that's one of the out is that are ever work and so it's kind of something we're very proud of and that's been done for many several years now and it's a big part of who we are i know ron we have been our audience today here three members of our a reserve bank of cleveland during one thousand nine hundred ninety two dr robert served as the senior staff economist on the president's council of economic advisers he was also an associate professor of economics at the university of oregon and visiting assistant professor at texas a and m university after you've received a speech d in economics from northwestern university his primary or area of research includes job training education low wage workers and the evaluation of workforce programs recently he has worked with the u department of labor to develop and implement a framework for adjusting national state and local performance targets for the workforce system and with the o e c d on issues related to partnerships between local economic development and workforce development agencies  well thank you very much for that great introduction and thank you everyone for coming out this morning i looked out my window i came in last night and looked out my window and saw the snow falling and i said well there might be maybe two or three people braving the weather  should know this is holland and this is that the west coast of michigan so i'm really glad to see off so many faces out here today and i'm sure you're wondering you know what this face is doing here we're you know is that phil said your check i guess it's been doing this for about fifteen years when i joined the ensuite back in i see twenty two years ago i think i went with george a few times in his presentations and i was always ask he came in with his resignation letter i put it in my drawer and i said george i will look at this later and so a year later we looked at it again he finally convinced me that he was serious about it so he he left but anyway for the retirement party we had one of  the film clips or video clips that we could find of him giving a joke and the funniest thing was his delivery of the joke and tell how bad it was so i am sure if i see any jokes for me and he he said it was probably better that i didn't try to do it he so successfully has done so no jokes of us you find some of my presentation funny well we'll see about that before i get too far into this i want to think a chemical bank again for their support the presentation as well as the michigan west coast chamber for sponsoring this event this is a great event something i know george looks forward to every year and he was being in north carolina was that right now he was presentation or others and is bill mentioned the reason is that he retired finally twenty eight years at the institute and he just has a new grandson nine pounds five ounces yeah so that was right  think just at the new year and it's every one of these everybody is doing well except when he sent me an e mail both of us have some experience in oregon and so i don't know if anybody watched the oregon football game where they you know cain or the other team whoever that was came back from a thirty one point deficit and won the game so i emailed back george after he sent me the details about his new grandson and said well maybe next year they could use him to fill some of those defensive holes that oregon seems to have for the nine pounds five ounces i think he's reading but anyway they're enjoying it jerks as he's he's more tired than he's ever been  to you know sort of accommodate new mothers as well with everything else that the grandfather has to do as many of you well know ok i want to wish everybody a happy new year but i  sure if you looked at the headlines or watched a little bit of the stock market last week we were really greeted with a lot of happy news or this is a bigger new year and i just want to throw out a few different the headlines that i was able to find on the on the internet in the past you could you know sort of take a copy of a newspaper you know and kind of have the nice logo and everything now you just have to pick up some words from the internet so it's not quite as fancy but the message is still there and that is that things really didn't get off to a very good start this year we see such you know messages is the dow has its worst four days start to a year on record it's not a very happy news for the new year  investors are alarmed by the decline in china's currency devaluation crude oil continues to fall let's move on to a few more is this another two thousand and eight and i'm going to use that theme for some of my my comparisons for the national scene and we'll get back to that in just a second but some are a little more us sanguine about this a little more confident that this isn't so we have a we start getting into this is to ask you know what what does this mean are we asked sort of the beginning of a downturn or not and so we'll look at some of those numbers but certainly last week china had another  difficult time but this really wasn't any new news we've known that china has had some difficult times with a slowing economy as well as the stock market that they're trying to basically develop you know china really hasn't had a very mature  know stock market for well you know for modern times basically and so it's a very small one as we'll see later but still it's something that people are paying a lot of attention to and last week it fell by what eleven point nine percent something like that and  had a few pick ups as well in terms of its regulatory glitches and so these things seem to have some type of spillover into what's happening here in the united states so when the stock market fell again like it did last summer our stock market followed suit so we had a pretty bad week of about a six percent decline just just one week so not a very good way to get the get the year started but let's put all that behind us right now and see you know what we can do to kind of get a perspective on twenty sixteen and you know maybe you know look back to see you know how  compares with two thousand and eight so when you leave this morning you won't be you know too well too concerned that you know we're we're starting off on the wrong foot this year like perhaps a perspective here and so this is sort of the summary of what i'd like to leave you with and i'll give you some numbers along the way so that you have something to base this on but the one reason that two thousand and sixteen should be like two thousand eight are a few things one is that what's happened in china really does not equal a global financial meltdown that we saw in two thousand and eight also we have some real strong fundamentals fundamentals in terms of pretty  a really good appointment numbers right now so that's a good sign and also we see that we still have growing consumer confidence at least before last week so consumer confidence is always a good a good indicator of you know how how well the economy is going to do in the near term and also we have a good solid balance sheet that is our household debt isn't out of line historically and also there doesn't seem to be any bubbles around at this point at least nothing that we can see and the housing market seems to be coming back and you know not you know is as roaring back as we we had before and that's probably a good sign because when things start to roar back that means that perhaps that there's not the fundamentals underneath that to sustain it but at the same time even though you know looks pretty good from those fundamentals we do have a few things that are of concern and so this is you know confident outlook can be tempered by a few things one is a weak international economy ok particularly china of course as we just looked at but but also the european countries some of them are are not doing as well as we'd like them to do at this stage we also have this continued strong stimuli in the u s in other words people feel that the economy is still being propped up by low interest rates and perhaps you know pretty and fiscal policy and we'll look at that just a few minutes we have a strong dollar that's good for inflation and good for imports but might not be so good for exports down the road so that's something to look at as well and then i have a category is called mental fatigue basically that is with that a pretty long business cycle pretty long expansion going on here and is a just the fact that you know we get a little tired that maybe this thing might start to slow down and we'll see what that looks like compared to some other business cycles down the road so here we go so what's on the docket this morning we'll look at this national situation and see how it compares back to about this time in two thousand and seven which is a long time ago now will turn to the state economy and take its polls and see how it might affect what's happening locally here in ottawa county and then we'll focus on our what counties economy and what ma green bars are what's already happened in the most recent couple of years and what i've put up here is to compare the last two years twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen and then the twenty sixteen  projections which you're in blue with what happened in two thousand and six and two thousand and seven so you see the green bars are the ones that are the the ones for the current situation and that is they're all above that line which is great they're all positive and if you look at what happened in two thousand and six and seven and then of course two thousand and eight when things started to turn south you can see that we're doing better at least in the last couple quarters with our green lines higher than those red lines and minus two and minus one periods in those referred to where we are today couple quarters back and then the consensus forecasts and this consensus forecast comes from fifty four forecasters around the country of the philadelphia fed polls every few months and so they have seem pretty confident about the fact that the economy is going to keep moving forward in fact if you have asked them what the probability of a recession might be they put it only about seven percent now back in two thousand and seven at this particular same time in the cycle when those same forecast had some really good months of last three months here and i've been the same thing with the graph i've tried to compare what's happening currently and this is over the last twenty four months these are months now instead of quarters the last twenty four months compared to what those twenty four months were like before things turned south at the end of two thousand and seven so here again you see those green bars and they're pretty pretty high up there in the red bars or the dark and i'm always colorblind so i have trouble getting these colors but the green lines are much higher than the red lines and the red lines are what happened before two thousand and seven december of two thousand and seven when  the recession started are you see you see that we're really pretty good shape here i have to horizontal lines once the average over the last twenty four months and here we've averaged two thousand two hundred forty thousand jobs per month which is great that's a for the last twenty four months two thousand two hundred forty thousand jobs a month at the is a great number compared to what we did in two thousand and six two thousand and seven luke is only one hundred thirty four thousand so you can see that our point is much more robust today than it was back then and as i mentioned of those last three months were even higher than that average so that's a good sign going and two thousand and sixteen so things look pretty good from that perspective and the consensus forecast for employment going into twenty sixteen is is pretty good here we see here again with the blue lines that it's looking what the forecast  where we lost really over a million jobs during that whole year so we don't want to repeat that at all and see if you look here the forecast from my end you'll basis you can see in twenty four teen that we had two hundred fifty eight thousand jobs a month which added up to a little over three million a year twenty fifteen were less than that but still very healthy a two point six million a year two hundred twenty one million a month and then before i ask again for twenty six thousand and twenty seventeen robust but remember that twenty seventeen even though it's only one hundred thirty three thousand per month that's still about the average of what it was for those twenty four months before the recession hit the end of two thousand and seven now a lot of these numbers come from the fact that we really have been strong demand for workers and we can see that by looking at the number of agencies pro or per job seeker and  it's the red line here and you can see how turn it around the number of job seekers purvey can see as a little better for what we have here and you can see that during the recession that red line really shot out that meant that there's a lot more people looking for that same job during the recession and there was before and after and you can see where their red line is today it's the almost at the same level that it was you know before the recession began so we're  really looking at about one and a half job seekers per job opening out there which means that you know labor markets are pretty tight at this particular time and the question that this raises is whether or not our supply of workers can really keep up with the demand and really for this is kind of a strange question for coming out of a recession in which we had to record highs in terms of the unemployed underemployed particularly for a long period of time was upwards of ten million which was a record setting number and so why just a few years after this that we worried about the supply of labor and when we still think that people are still trying to  find jobs that really suit their skills well it really isn't that strange a question for many developing countries you know european countries face this as well as even china today is having a difficult time with the  supply of labor and one of the problems is population growth here occupation growth is a little over one percent and we primarily depend on immigration to fill a lot of this demand for workers also labor force  is low is that we've seen in a long long time and a lot of this has to do with the composition of our labor force we have the aging side of it where people are now you know moving into retirement and then we have the early side of it and that is where younger people are postponing really getting into the labor force for education and and for other reasons some of it is they just can't find a job match that they're expecting and also the fact that you know we have this kind of natural read about employment is a little higher than what it was before some frictions that are going on within the economy so as i mentioned over the long run many analysts believe that the trends are moving in the wrong direction we've got population growth slow and as i mentioned we have this composition demographic composition of the labor force that said causing the labor force participation rate to fall as well and then we have this  problem of skill for the mismatch and we've heard complaints over the last the whole business cycle basically since things started to improve in two thousand and nine about many web companies are unable to find qualified workers  and this is something that academics researchers industry analysts have been looking at for a number of years and have barely been scratching their heads trying to figure out you know are these complaints really well founded certainly when you ask somebody and they complain i can't find anybody going to take it seriously but one of the questions began to one of the questions is that have companies really can those who are complaining have really completed that sentence i can't find qualified workers at what wage and one of the things that we're seeing is that the wages the compensation has still remained pretty steady when if we really are facing skill shortages we might be bidding up you know wages in order to attract those more qualified workers but so far we haven't seen much of that and that's why this line here shows that it's been pretty steady over the entire expansion of this is that the national level will see the same thing at the state and local level as well so that the employment seemed strong growth and perhaps skill shortages that you know we have to deal with and if we can't find qualified workers that something that we need to really consider as we look into the future of our future employment  situation so let's move on to some other components of fundamentals and one as i mentioned earlier is consumer confidence in here since the exe expansion began to recover began in two thousand and nine we've really seen this steady upward movement in consumer confidence which is a really good thing and well as well as you know household or consumer debt has also increased with that but fortunately it hasn't gotten out of hand like it did in the  two thousand and seven two thousand and eight period where at that point that there was one hundred thirty five percent of disposable income now or only about one hundred percent of disposable income but at the same time you can see here that  consumers are really not spending beyond their means which is a good thing and we even see that the first in a while is this is consumption divided by the income that households have has actually fall over the last several years and much of this has to do with the fact that just more people are finding jobs with their income is increasing and so a good sign we are in a good range of about eighty percent of our out lays as a percent of personal income over this period of time so that's not a concern either but more of a really strong fundamental for going into twenty sixteen now what about some bubbles ok what kind of  possibilities are there out there a list first look at the housing market and ask is that is there any housing bubble i kind of feel like this next presentation is sort of like that book and if you read it to your kids or your grand kids about where spot you know you you go from one page and there is a puppy you know that i would be under a oh a box or behind her nurse something like that so we're looking for bubbles anywhere in the economy so let's see if we can find so is there a housing bubble somewhere under these boxes or behind the curve well it doesn't appear to be so housing prices they recover which is great but they recover in a gradual way and they really haven't exceed you know what we saw back in two thousand and six that at the height of the sixty thousand staff so that's a good sign what about the stock market bubble ok well price to earnings ratio which is a good indicator of this is really at this point below the average that  dot com bubble the high tech bubble and so we're nowhere close to that that situation what about the art of history at something that's a little closer to home is there a bubble in the auto industry i haven't seen much press on that so maybe we're safe here doesn't look like it either we just had this gradual increase over the last five years or so in terms of the number of vehicles that are  being produced in inventory which is a good sign and if you look at this more historically you see that we're really just returning to normal it was a you know we took a big plunge of course in the recession in terms of auto production as we all know being here in michigan of course and but you know we're getting back to where it was before and i will see in just a second that you know there are some good optimism in the auto industry at this particular at this particular time so that's that's a good sign as well don't have to remind everybody that you know michigan went through a real serious restructuring not just during the recession but since about two thousand when the auto industry just continued to decline in terms of number of people employed there and and companies actually in in in michigan i think at the the end of her about the time in which the recession stepped or started that we lost more jobs than we had left at that particular time and then we went into recession so you can see that there's been some very serious restructuring and we've come out of this pretty well even though course the number of jobs in the auto industry is far fewer than what we had back at the beginning of the decade i guess i should say the beginning of two thousand it was even before then so but the car industry fundamentals are are sound as well we've got some old cars on the road kind of georgia and he has to bring in a picture of his old car that he drives around and and use that as an example of somebody who just also have low gas prices this means that some of the most profitable you know models in the in the auto industry are very popular they're coming back at prices haven't really trended up that quickly you know higher than what we see with producers but you know we've been there before and we certainly have a lot of penetration of imports into the economy and so into the u s economy and still producing eighteen million ourselves here from  domestic production moving on to other bubbles oil certainly doesn't seem like above one measure looking at it from the other direction that might be a black hole but prices still continue to fall and opec policy seems to be one in which they want to you know keep open and keep you know new reserves offline and that keeps our prices low there's concern that the low prices might also be because of low demand but it really seems like it's a supply issue at this point isn't more so than demand and then are there certain major cities in which housing prices might be taking off and we you know we have to be concerned about back to the could be contagious and other places well it didn't seem to be at this particular site but you never know what hit you until it happens and so you know there could be some bubbles lurking anybody see the big short i just saw it last sunday ok or read the book quite interesting to see you know just a few people that you know a few years before this happened that really started to see that you know what was happening there was really something that was serious and really was not that well understood or known by others too so perhaps something's out there lurking but can't really see it at this particular time a concern also of course is the as i mentioned some of the  growth rates and g d p over so here starting in twenty ten and you can see you know how china has decline its growth rate has declined from about ten percent down to about seven and a half percent ok over this time period and this has a lot of people concerned that you know china is just going to come to a screeching halt and you know it's going to bring the world into into recession certainly china is a big economy now it's the second largest in the in the world but to go from ten percent down to seven point five percent they're still producing or having an increase in production each year it's almost twice what our production is in the u here the chinese economy is about ten trillion ours is seventeen trillion if they grow at seven point three percent a year they are producing seven hundred twenty four billion additional of g d p dollars this is output there you go around in terms of what's happening inside of china some of the other concerns of course is europe you know europe it down twenty and twenty thirteen below zero we knew that they were skirting a recession but came back some and you know they're coming back you know pretty well right now but still there are some fundamentals over there that are our concern especially some of the you know the sovereign debt issues that they have and also just this you know the whole european central bank issue and how they can be a positive force in in keeping europe going going forward in japan keep that bouncing around as you can see here positive a few years then goes into some type of a few quarters of negative growth and then back up to the positive but japan's been dealing with deflation issues for a number of decades now and so that's a big concern there and that's certainly something that we don't want to replicate here in the u s and that's why the fed has been reluctant to  increase interest rates which we'll get to in just a few minutes let's look at china and little bigger perspective here of course is a big player in the world now continues to be a bigger player in the world it's about thirteen percent of the world's th is twenty two percent and you can see some of the other major country countries you can read those numbers because you can't i can't even read it from here ok i forgot to mention the slides will be available for anybody who wants to be able to read these things in your leisure but take my word for ok yeah i even enlarged those but that i have my glasses on here but the point here is that if you look at the world economy and then you look at the equity that up because you know we're spending so much time focusing on what's happened with this stock market in china where it's only two percent of the world's you know value of equity where the u s it's fifty two percent so you know my question is to you know to a stock broker if you know troopers are you going to let that two percent of the world drive if you do two percent of the world star i just hope they don't but we seem to be obsessed right now with what's happening in china and of course as we all know that stock market is very immature they're trying to develop it the chinese government is making retore changes and at the same time making mistakes and how they actually you know regulate this market  one of the big mistakes was last week when they had this trigger that is supposed to stop the market going to fall a certain amount well in twenty nine minutes it fell seven percent the market closed down before the thing even got started so you know there's a lot of  r work yet that has to be done to make that a much more efficient market for for equity trading ok i also mention that we're still experiencing some some boost from some very accommodating policy monetary policy as well as physical policy and let's just look here at the thing and the interest rates here we see even with that much announced and much anticipated interest rate hike of the fed funds rate of point two five percent ok that's a whopping i mean how many would if you had a point two five percent increase in your interest rate for your mortgage on your house how many would just say forget it i'm just not going to you know i'm going to re now forget it ok but anyway we were anticipating this for so long and it finally happened and you can even see it on my chart even if you had glasses and wrote close to it but still we have a very common dating monetary policy is one of the concerns that you know we were still depending on this to keep our economy moving well we haven't really tried to see whether or not it can sustain itself on its own with a point two five percent increase which you can see over this whole period of time interest rates are you know no matter what it might be more home mortgage rate in your ti vo you know it's already pretty low historically as well as over the last ten or so years and also one of the reasons for this is that the c p i is very low and it's actually skirted with being negative which is a very much of a concern for everybody if we start falling into that deflationary area well banks here demand is you know of course it appears and no significant regulatory a tightening which is also good because if we have accommodating monetary policy we want to get that money out of the economy if we can and one of the problems has been in the past that you know the balance sheets just happened to bed and we basically shift the balance sheets from the banks to the fed so not a whole lot of money to really have spilled in the economy but that's a whole nother story and then again we mentioned the fed funds rate they have a target of two percent inflation and this is why they haven't been very anxious to raise interest rates because the inflation is still far below that you see you know we're skirting with zero once again at this particular time and so you know unless the inflation searcy get up towards two percent the fed's you know not going to be  dar which is really skyrocketed over this last few years and this is the biggest rally since about one of the middle of twenty fourteen beginning at twenty fifteen in forty years i mean this is huge and one of the reasons of course is what's happening with our monetary policy ok estate low where other countries are are still higher ok and so but now with this increases hike in the  also that's probably the biggest reason for this but the other one is the fact that we're just you know a more robust economy than some of the other countries are and so there's a demand for our our dollar because of that and also again the safe haven aspect of it as well so the last i had my hand on the national scene remember was this mental fatigue you know are we just getting tired of of growing after almost seven years at this particular time we're ninety six months into an expansion into the business cycle and about with that be about eighty into eighteen months into the expansion itself and we've only had four expand her four business cycles in the entire history of the united states that have lasted longer than we're in right now and that's hard to believe because we've always wondered when this expansion is going to began remember it was took such a long time to really kind of get out of  the dollar terms of this this deep hole that we had dug for ourselves but isn't it a little sobering to think that specially since world war two we've only had three business cycles that are longer than the one that we're in right now and here they are hundred sixty to sixty nine you can read those numbers ninety one to two thousand and one that was the longest one ever that was the one that went throughout the you know the whole sort of tactics mansion that we experience and other things happening during that time wanted to ninety was a another good one but that was after some really you know them trying to rein in inflation out of the country back in the late seventy's and then we had to go back to back recession's eighty one eighty two and then from that point on it was clear sailing for almost either nine years the shortest one was the one that we just came off of before this recession began and that was two thousand and one to two thousand and seven but here we are two thousand and seven to the present but it wasn't until the seventy six months that we were able to have this you know be at the same level employment that we were at the start of the of this cycle and that time even the slowest response was a five percent increase as the two thousand and one to two thousand and seven and you see at seventy six months if you went back to one thousand nine hundred sixty nine they had already added twenty percent more meant to the economy than what they started with at the beginning of in coming to get back to where we were also the engine about the stimulus you can see here how our interest rates are so much lower in our cycle that and other cycles ours is the one that is sort of just starting to pick up from the zero line there with that little you know kind of uptick there that's the point two five percent increase but you can see where the other ones are between you know four and even eight eight or so percent and you can see for that nineteen or one thousand nine hundred one which is the red one that interest rates were just out of out of sight there for a while i remember i bought my house back and i see one nine hundred eighty one and i excited about walking into an eleven percent mortgage rate at the time you can see that said different era we're facing today ok let me set up the national scene going to before going on to michigan and what we find is that you know it's hard to find labor and skill shortages that jeff you know could be a concern but so far things look pretty solid going into twenty sixteen so what we want to michigan quickly and what we have here are you know again some pretty solid numbers we've added ninety five thousand jobs from the third quarter to the twenty fourteen to twenty fifteen the most recent data that we have available manufacturing has been a large part of that a twenty four thousand jobs during this time and if you use a multiplier the doors like the use of maybe three point eight we find that you know we're really driven by manufacturing here in michigan so that's a good sign but at the same time manufacturing starts to decline then the rest of the economy out might follow suit again are there labor shortages here probably and some skill shortages and some industries as well as others but it doesn't seem like  you know we're recent story right here that the wrong ok sorry if i get that wrong sequence here let me look at manufacturing as i mentioned it's a very big bubble not a bubble but a very big ball for michigan it's one that increasing employment more so than any of the other sectors in the economy which is a good sign and here we go so is there a possible labor shortage well the wages are indicating this at all there's still flat like we saw in the u s we're still at jobs even the forecasts are showing pretty positive job growth in the future not like what we're seeing at twenty fifteen but still you know in the sixty thousand mark which is the good sign in here we see that even though we're not quite is a robust is the u s going forward the forecast we came off a pretty good twenty fifteen and we're still going to stay at about one point four one point five percent increase in the next two years unemployment rate which is something that's very good to report is that we're right at the national level you know usually we're a little higher than that but now we're at five point one in the national level is five point zero so we're really very close they're coming off of a very high mark of about fifteen percent unemployment at the depths of the recession where the u s is only a ten so we really you know come back in and in a good position here so that moses to ottawa county and this is where we're starting to get closer to that forecast that everybody's waiting for so  what it means is the data aren't available as quickly as they were before county data isn't is as readily or didn't come out as quickly as that as that m s a data does so  ottawa county residents who comes in to ottawa county to work and who leaves are walking to work else where and obviously mostly employment is east out west and it's a little hard to work out there at the lake but maybe do but as of this is but you can see it's east and north east which is the predominant commuting pattern we have about fifty thousand people commuting into ottawa county to work we have sixty four thousand commuting out of ottawa county for this this part of michigan like we saw with the michigan economy and our county manufacturing is doctor about thirty three percent of your workers are working in manufacturing and i'm like michigan you know here you health the area which is usually a fairly dominant one is is you know not not as large but it you know is about the same size as you can see that ball down there is the same sizes you know some of the other sectors here as well so  again manufacturing a large courier economy at the same time it's producing a lot of additional jobs at about two thousand five hundred over this period time second quarter twenty fourteen second quarter twenty fifteen  the unemployment rate we thought she got it was good but yours is even much better you're down to about three percent which could be another indication about you know having difficulty finding jobs and if you're to mention that some people bit skeptical about this low unemployment rate said well maybe it's just people leaving or not looking for jobs but here he broke it down for you and he said if we look at twenty fifteen where we you know reduce the unemployment by the number of people unemployed by a thousand people well that came about with an additional five thousand new jobs at the same time four thousand people came into the labor force so that's a great base  to really build on in terms of you know this low climate great hunger rate i should say and so it's not just people who are you know discouraged leaving the labor force they're coming back to the way we're forced as well as that new jobs are being created now the next several slides is just to give you a perspective of how ottawa county is doing since about two thousand and four and you can see it through this business cycle which is shaded here i'm sorry the recession which is shaded here high as some of the the other two entities the u s and michigan so let's first look at here we have total climate you know employment grew much faster than michigan in the u s during that time services grew  you know pretty fast to get back up to this this higher line of what the u s is doing michigan is still it service growth is still below you know what it was you know going into that the recession  manufacturing is doing quite well here it certainly had took a dive but not as bad as a state as a whole and then it started coming back at a much faster pace as you can see that line steeper than michigan's blue line  county and then what we wanted to do was to look at your core industries and to see how they fear over a period of time did these industries outperform their national rivals so what we're looking at here is did we do better than what our industry did the national level and the industries that we chose were these corporate histories of food manufacturing plastics and rubber these are core in a sense because they have a what's called a  potion what you call it they location quotient every go of two or greater that means that we have a much higher concentration here in ottawa county than the nation as a whole and we have a higher concentration food manufacturing plastics and rubber manufacturing perimenopause you can go down the list here fabricated metals furniture manufacturing and the question is how are they doing relative to the industry as a whole at the national level and here you see in this particular graph is that these core industries added fifty seven hundred jobs over this period time and all but a couple of them or three i should say did better than the national average though that means that you're not only concentrated in these industries but they're more competitive they're able to produce and also employ at a higher level than their national counterparts and this was in food this isn't plastics primary never was about even it only losing two hundred three relative to the national and then the one that was the most problematic of it was transportation equipment during this time which which lost some ground but it was picked up by a big increase in computer like tronics as well as in furniture during this period of time so that's a really good sign again your core industries are doing better than their counterparts at the national  spans you know from the high tech down to you know varia you know remedial jobs in manufacturing and so what we see is that you know we have if you and all these lines each different colors are different years  that you know pretty much these wages at all levels are are pretty stable even though we've seen a little bit of a decline in the offer and but you know i don't think that's you know a lot to be concerned about there's just a lot of noise up there and one of the reasons not to be too concerned is perhaps the fact that we have a very highly educated labor force here in ottawa county you can see here just call out itself the city where we have an associates degree we have for the prime age a worker of thirty five or forty four we have a higher percentage of associate degree holders then in michigan and in the united states and when we go to the bachelor's degrees or higher you can see that you know we're the same for a specially for this twenty five thirty four year old group that we have a very highly educated labor force which is a very good sign for for the area and it isn't just the fact that we have this blood of you know highly educated people they're also earning much more than those that with a lower degree you can see here that a graduate degree brings in about eighty five thousand dollars a bachelor's about forty five and then associates a good excuse to go down the list here and also if you have a higher degree like a graduate degree or vassar's degree you certainly have a much higher likelihood to be employed which is also good sign again like we were talking about earlier about shortages it's always a question it's not something we have really good data about but this is a very interesting graph because what we're able to do here is look at the for you know workers of different educational levels and this is based upon job postings this is what the job postings are asking in terms of require and so we see the thirty percent of the job postings here in ottawa county are requiring a bachelor's degree and twenty one percent of our employed workers have a bachelor's degree so  this continues then we'll find that you know we're going to need to increase that supply of basters degrees even though you know we have a you know very highly educated group so that means that are our employers are looking for  you know talented individuals as well as very gauged in you know production and other activities that are very much asking for a you know highly qualified individual which means th income is higher or you know just a whole bunch of benefits to the community but something to there will be monitoring here and you know as we look at these numbers going forward something that i think you know you can you know think about here not a lot as well ok so finally the forecasts the employment forecasts and dirty i hear makes this kind of a big deal kind of drags it out and it says ok you know well i you know let's look at something a little you know something a little different before we actually get to it so see if we can create the same type of drama that ga ga creates ok so the forecasts are twenty six twenty seventeen and then he says well let's go back and see what we did last time ok so let's review last year's four asked and he does this a lot just to kind of you know sure how well he does but in this case he really just the mark ok i can say this about dirty business isn't anything i did ok but he missed it are in a good way because this goods producing sector of the ottawa county economy really took off six point two percent this is still an aston even though i put actual here because we don't have the numbers for the whole year so this might come down a little or it might go up but still six point two percent is something that we just did see as we looked at this a year ago over but the others were pretty much in the ballpark and george would be very proud about how well we did in the service provider and and told to sector here government that's been a problem you know we keep missing the mark here because of you know budget cuts and other things that keep keep going on ok so you know how accurate george is and how you know and he's just you know just always had his hand right on the pulse of things so now for the now for the estimates for the forecast twenty six twenty six seventeen well unfortunately george likes to do next is the show how he actually came about the estimate i think i say to george people don't want to know how you did it they just want to know what it is you know you do in here fifteen years or so they trust you well it's a little ugly watching some of these things being made like it is watching sausages you see here but we'll go through some of his thought process ok well construction how is that doing well it's doing pretty well it has a robust pace single family housing though is tapered off twenty fourteen so that my temper the the forecasts a little bit real wages are are flat so again nothing's twenty fifteen down to two percent again reflecting sort of the slowdown in the state and a little bit of a forecast a slowdown in the u s we can't sustain six point two percent i'm good producing but it's still pretty strong at two point four and one point nine percent in the service provider is actually going to go up a little bit twenty seventeen but still hovering around two percent and government is seen to begin to get back on its feet from losing jobs to gain a few back so there's the forecast and how does that compare with the u s will get out of the counties in green and so twenty fifteen did much better than both the u s and michigan the forecast still has doing better in ottawa county than in both of those those entities so final thoughts the u s michigan auto county seemed to be in a good position with some real strong fundamentals and it's highly unlikely that the economy will turn negative at twenty sixteen knocking on wood you know there's going to forecasters have a low probability of any contraction during that time but there's still some things to be concerned about international markets maybe we have a dramatic drop in the consumer confidence index after last week but let's hope not we still keep being obsessed with china's dach market you know such a small percentage of the world's equity and we look at lessons from europe we certainly don't want to fall into that debt trap and any major way and then of course just unforseen events one being it's not an unforseen one but we don't know what's going to happen with the political situation and that's always a wild card when it comes to the euro to future growth so and that again thank you very much for your attention i know there's a lot of science that you could read but i hope you have a chance to look at her and really have a basis for understanding what we time for about one more question so that you can look at them in more detail and hopefully see a little bit better thank you all for coming this morning be very careful out there i was looking at the twitter feed just a few minutes ago looks like lots of slide offs and accidents and that kind of thing typical west michigan january morning but still please be careful and the west coast chamber invite you back next month february ninth for the next early bird breakfasts with that thank you have a great day