St. Cloud could be looking at a recession locally while the nation isn’t in one.\u00a0 St. Cloud State Economist King Banaian joined me on WJON to discuss the local economy.\u00a0 He says the St. Cloud area is showing signs of a recession while it doesn’t appear to be happening nationally.<\/p>\n
Local Recession?<\/p>\n
Banaian says the local recession is based on businesses on his latest survey indicating that they are pulling back on investing.\u00a0 25% of responding businesses indicated their business was down, 15-20% expect to be down for the next 6 months.\u00a0 Banaian says business leaders are naturally optimistic so when less than half of them feel their business will be down for the next 6 months, that is “pretty bad.”\u00a0 He says their survey of local business leaders were negative about the national economy despite measures indicating the national economy is pretty good.<\/p>\n
Layoffs?<\/p>\n
When the local economy isn’t good, Banaian says there are layoff “sometimes” but not all the time.\u00a0 He says 2-3 years ago many businesses couldn’t find enough labor, many of them adjusted to use more automation which could include AI.\u00a0 Many of those adjustments held as positions that weren’t filled remain unfilled.<\/p>\n
Gas Prices<\/p>\n
Gas prices have been on the steady decline in recent weeks.\u00a0 Banaian doesn’t expect prices to drop much more without a clear indication that the war with Iran is over.\u00a0 He says prices won’t likely go back up unless the fighting intensifies.\u00a0 He says gas prices may go up a bit today or tomorrow with a holiday weekend approaching.<\/p>\n
Housing<\/p>\n
Banaian says there is nothing alarming in regards to housing in the St. Cloud area.\u00a0 He does suspect that those who were interested in moving awhile ago, but chose not to, may make the move as prices have stabilized a bit.\u00a0 Banaian doesn’t expect interest rates to change in the foreseeable future but if they were to change, they could go up to slow inflation.<\/p>\n
If you’d like to listen to my conversation with King Banaian, click below.<\/p>\n
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Come Visit Meire Grove in Pictures<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"St. Cloud could be looking at a recession locally while the nation isn’t in one.\u00a0 St. Cloud State…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550972,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[3090,28,101,24964,24965,24966,4910,24967,24968],"class_list":["post-737484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-articles","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-from-our-shows","tag-from-the-wjon-newsroom","tag-morning-newswatch-with-jay-caldwell","tag-newsletter","tag-show-notes","tag-st-cloud-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=737484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737484\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=737484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=737484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=737484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}