Sober forecast
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Keene Sentinel Editorial
For the last 23 years Ocean National Bank and its local predecessors — Keene Savings Bank and Granite Bank — have hosted an economic seminar that’s not so much a working session as it is a meal for a couple of hundred local business people at the Keene County Club, followed by an economist’s short talk, followed by a round of golf.
For 20 of those years, John Tuccillo, a real estate economist from Arlington Va., has been the talker. He’s funny, self-deprecating, articulate and interesting, in part because his long-term view is generally sunny; a significant basis for his optimism has long been the fact that the country has what he terms a “wonderful demographic profile.” Translation: Baby Boomers tend to buy things, including second homes.
But at last Wednesday’s annual event Tuccillo’s tune was decidedly gloomy. “There is more downside possibility in the economy than there is upside possibility,” he said.
The source of Tuccillo’s downbeat reading isn’t any single thing — and certainly not the softening real estate market, which he says is far less pronounced in some parts of the country than in others, and which he’s confident will resolve itself anyway.
The negatives that worry him aren’t the sort of things that will cure themselves, or simply go away, or be trumped by a wondrous, unknown economic force. They are conditions for which there is no devised remedy and no apparent national concern. They include declines in real incomes, the unabated accumulation of personal and government debt, the nation’s continuing oil addiction, the profusion of dangerously speculative home mortgages and the steady shift of technological innovation from the United States to other countries.
“We’re losing pace,” he said of the nation’s economic stature, in remarks following his talk. “It saddens me.”
It was jarring to hear this from a man whose seminar pronouncements through years of national economic cycles and rotations of Republicans and Democrats in Washington have been consistently upbeat.
The only positive takeaway message from his talk was the fact that, while he sees scant efforts to address national economic weaknesses, Tuccillo says he spots some positives in the Keene area. They include, he said, “the ability of this area to attract and nurture innovators, thinkers and technological tinkerers.”
He’s right. The growth of the high-tech optics and miniature bearings industries in the region, plus the heath of machine tool service firms, plus the phenomenal growth of C&S Wholesale Grocers, a multi-billion-dollar national distribution enterprise that owes much of its growth to technological innovation, are credits to the region.
There are other local innovations that aren’t so obvious. They include the presence of a workforce coordinator on the Greater Keene Chamber of Commerce, whose job includes lining up effective training schools for workers. Another local initiative: a collaboration of employers, environmentalists, government officials and nonprofit groups to bring workforce housing to the region. Still another: the presence of a nonprofit economic development unit to help attract new employers and retain the good ones that the region already hosts. Still another: the creation of business incubation units to help the next big thing get started.
These steps reflect a state of mind that’s not evident at the national level: a concrete awareness that good things don’t just happen and that problems don’t solve themselves. Whether the local initiatives will make a difference if the national economy goes down the tubes is a debatable proposition. But it makes common sense to try.