San Francisco, a city of booms and busts, could find itself once again playing a central role in the next recession.
“In the Bay Area, you should see the warning signs earlier than anywhere else,” Jerry Nickelsburg, senior economist with the UCLA Anderson Forecast, said Friday at the ninth annual Bay Area Council Economic Forecast Conference, which drew about 100 people to a windowless conference room at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank.
Nickelsburg said he’s anticipating another year of growth of about 2.5 percent. And even if the economy does slip into recession, he cautioned that it won’t approach the severity of the downturn triggered by the 2008 financial crisis.
The UCLA Anderson Forecast’s Bay Area outlook calls for the region to hit record employment levels — again — both this year and in 2017 as the Bay Area economy continues to “outperform.”
Consider all that optimism to be the preamble heard in an airline’s pre-flight announcements just before you’re told, “In the unlikely event the plane goes down over water …”
The first risk factor to the national economy, as Nickelsburg described it in his talking points: “Unicorns, pentacorns and decacorns, oh my!”…
“Let the press start playing up that we now have another high-tech bubble and it’s bursting, and what are households going to do? They could well boost their savings rate,” Nickelsburg said… (more)
