Ernie Goss Survey Quotations

Of course the loss of the 2,400 GM jobs will hurt the Oklahoma and Oklahoma City economies. However, given the provisions of job banks, the full force of the negative impacts will not be felt until 2008. In the interim, our survey points to solid growth with positive job gains in the months ahead for Oklahoma's economy.

Businesses in North Dakota definitely benefited from much warmer weather for the month according to comments from businesses in our survey. It is difficult to separate out the impacts of weather from more fundamental economic factors, but even so, our survey still points to solid growth in the months ahead.

Survey results, while somewhat weaker than the rest of the nation, continue to point to growth for Missouri in the months ahead. Of course challenges and opportunities related to automobile industry restructuring will be an important driver in the near and intermediate term.

The trend in economic reports from supply managers in our survey has been fairly positive since October of last year following some of the negative shipping impacts from Hurricane Katrina. Companies with strong ties to the state's growing ethanol industry reported solid growth for February but were very optimistic about future economic growth for this sector.

The bankers in our survey reported economic weakness across the board for February with readings of 28.8 for retail sales, 44.0 for new hiring and 38.5 for home sales.

For 2006, Minnesota's big economic stories will be problems related to the continuing cutbacks in the U.S. auto industry, a turnaround for the telecommunications industry, and finally a weakening of Minnesota's construction industry. Nonetheless, our survey points to still solid growth for the first half of 2006.