Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Georgia Economic 'Snapshots'

When I first read the headline noting ATL is the #31 destination for movers according to U-Haul I was thinking 'cool, this is good for us!'. Unfortunately, when I read the article we were #1 in 2008 and #6 in 2009. People, Georgia is lagging! It's not just the data from 1.4M rentals by U-Haul--it's our water issues, our schools and our transportation problems. MARTA rail? Forget it... for a city our size we have the fewest miles of rail (compare us to Washington DC). We need to have a regional entity to make ATL competitive on that front. Many other topics but that's just one bugging me right now. The top 5 cities per U-Haul? 1-Houston (Houston?); 2-Orlando; 3-Vegas; 4-Chicago; 5-Portland. Oh what the heck-- 6-San Antonio; 7-Austin; 8-Brooklyn; 9-Sacramento and 10-Kansas City, MO (huh?).

We're also #8 for "financial distress". We scored 61.3 on CredAbility's Financial Distress Index--a score below 70 indicates a state of financial distress. A score of 60 or less is considered an emergency crisis. We are unfortunately in "good company". The top-10 in order are: Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Indiana, Georgia, North Carolina and California. The 'punchline' in this story is that these 10 states produce over 33% of the country's GDP (no, it's not really a punchline, more like a punch in the gut). In essence, economic indicators are looking up; it's just that individual bottom lines have not fully recovered. Give it time; hang on fellow Georgians! Who knows--maybe we'll be able to vote on Sunday sales sometime soon; wouldn't that be a novel concept!

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