Boston skyline from Belmont
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The very rich greater Boston area may be signaling that a recession is coming. Bloomberg News reports that for the first time since the Great Recession “tenants in the third quarter cut back on office and lab space in Boston, Cambridge and the suburbs, said Aaron Jodka, who leads the research team at Colliers International Group Inc.’s Boston office. A quarter-over-quarter reduction in occupied space in all three markets has only happened during recessions or in the early stages of a recovery, he said.’’ Boston has seen a boom in the construction of office and luxury residential space since the end of the Great Recession, with new skyscrapers making downtown resemble Manhattan.
New York and some other cities are reporting declines similar to what’s being reported in Boston.
We often don’t know we're in a recession until after one has started. A big challenge in fighting the next one will be that the oceanic federal budget deficits, in part from Republican tax cuts for the rich, as well as the very, very low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve, apparently at least partly in response to pressure from Trump, even in a time of (general) prosperity, will give the federal government far weaker tools than in previous downturns to fight a recession. They’ve used them up when they didn’t need them.
Happily, the Bay State has a very able administration led by Gov. Charlie Baker that would probably deal with the challenges of recession better than the leaderships of most states, and, of course, Massachusetts will continue to be one of America’s richest places.
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