GREENVILLE, NC (January 14, 2025) — The nation’s economic picture is a bright one, and measures for the state and local economy are positive, but the future remains unclear, an expert told more than 200 area business leaders gathered this week for an annual economic update.
Rick Niswander, a former vice chancellor for administration and finance at East Carolina University, said that while there is some lingering concern about inflation, in terms of the bigger economic picture, “things are pretty darn good.” Niswander, also a former dean of ECU’s College of Business and a professor emeritus of accounting, spoke at the Greenville-Pitt County Chamber of Commerce’s Economic Forecast Luncheon.
The 19th annual event came on the eve of the release of Greenville ENC-Alliance’s comprehensive economic performance report. The organization celebrated a record year in 2024, when Greenville and Pitt County saw $730 million in new capital investment and the creation of nearly 1,200 jobs.
“By almost all economic indicators, our community is performing well and we will be surging in the near future,” Greenville ENC-Alliance President and CEO Josh Lewis said at Monday’s luncheon at the Hilton Greenville.
Niswander last addressed the economic forecast event in February 2022, following the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’re still working on what happened with COVID,” he said. “The economy was rolling along just fine before COVID hit and it fell off the edge of a cliff. It has recovered extraordinarily well, but some parts aren’t back to whatever the new normal is.”
Niswander said the U.S. labor force has shown signs of recovery from COVID, although the labor participation rate, which has been falling since the 1990s, continues its slow decline. There are about 2.1 million fewer workers than at the start of COVID. But North Carolina’s civilian labor force, which numbers more than 5 million, includes about 400,000 more workers than when COVID began, he said.
“The U.S., North Carolina and Greenville, in all three of those entities, for the last three years the unemployment rate has been bouncing around the lowest numbers ever,” Niswander said.
The average national unemployment rate was 4.2% in November 2024, compared with 3.7% in North Carolina. Greenville’s unemployment rate during that same period mirrored the state average.
“For the last two, two and a half years we’ve been a little better than the national average,” Niswander said of the state unemployment rate. “Before that, we were a little worse than the national average, so that’s shifted a little.”
He said people need to pay more attention to trends and numbers over time than to monthly reports that are estimates at best. Niswander pointed to a report issued this month that showed an increase of 256,000 jobs nationwide in December and the resulting stock market reaction.
“One of the challenges we have in this country is we have an extremely complex economy, millions and millions of moving parts,” Niswander said. “… We ascribe a lot of precision to data points that isn’t warranted.”
Regarding inflation, Niswander said, the reason many people scoff at the idea of 2.7% overall inflation is because of the varying degree to which inflation has affected different goods and services.
“Prices go up and actually you want a little inflation,” he said. “You do not want an extended period of time when prices are going down. Trust me, you don’t, because that means everything’s going down. You don’t want depression.”
His presentation displayed a chart showing that prices for items such as used cars and personal computers have decreased slightly, while there have been sharp increases in the cost of car insurance and pet services.
“The economy is extraordinarily complex and how you personally experience the economy is different from the person sitting next to you,” Niswander said.
He pointed to complex issues that cloud the economic outlook as well. Niswander said the 2025-26 economic activity “will depend on the breadth, depth and speed” of factors including tariffs, deportations and tax legislation. These factors, he said, may put prices, inflation, wage levels and interest rates at risk.
He said tariffs, such as those that are being discussed by incoming President Trump, are often a “lose-lose” proposition.
“Except in limited cases, the cost of tariffs is born by businesses and consumers in the U.S.,” he said.
“If we put a tariff on something from Canada, what’s Canada going to do? They’re going to put a tariff on something that we’ve been sending to them.”
He also said that depending on the scale of the proposed deportation efforts, construction and agriculture industries could be hard hit.
“Depending on what happens over the next six to nine months for each of those things will depend on what the economy toward the end of ’25 and ’26 will be, and there is nobody in this room that has a clue what the answer is,” he said. “We don’t know the breadth, and we don’t know the depth and we don’t know the speed, and if you don’t know those things you can’t accurately predict the future very well.”
Niswander also used his talk to sound the alarm regarding a projected population decrease in eastern North Carolina. While Pitt County’s population is expected to increase about 18 percent between 2023 and 2024, he said, many counties in the region are continuing to decline.
“The challenge with this for us is not that Pitt County is growing,” he said. “That’s a good thing for us. We’ve grown in the past. We’ve expected to grow again but if you take Pitt County out, it (regional growth) is negative.”
He said that having ECU and ECU Health gives the county a strong economic base that neighboring counties do not have and said Pitt is in a position to help uplift the region.
“We’re a magnet for the east, a really positive magnet,” Niswander said. “We’ve got to help them help themselves to help hold onto their folks because if their populations go down, at some point it’s going to affect us.”
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Article courtesy of Kim Grizzard (Staff Writer)
The Daily Reflector