Moody’s Report: North Dakota Will Emerge From Recession by the End of 2016
Stacked rigs are seen along with other idled oil drilling equipment at a depot in Dickinson, North Dakota June 26, 2015. Since November, the Saudi Arabian-led OPEC cartel has held to a policy of unconstrained output, an approach many suspect is designed to flood global markets with more crude, push prices lower and punish rivals, including North Dakota, the second-largest U.S. oil producer. Picture taken June 26, 2015. REUTERS/Andrew Cullen
Has North Dakota hit the bottom of the post-oil boom economic downturn? A point from which the bleeding in terms of declining economic activity and tax revenues can begin to recover?
Moody’s Analytics, which contracts with the state to do just that sort of economic forecasting, seems to think so. Though given the company’s poor track record in forecasting the state’s revenues over the last several years, it’s hard to know how serious to take such projections.
Below is the latest report from Moody’s to lawmakers about the economic outlook of the state. Lawmakers (one of them was kind enough to share this with me) get three of these reports a year.
This is Moody’s mixed outlook for the state’s economy at the end of 2016, and heading into 2017:
You can read the full report, along with a lot of interesting graphs, below. It’s worth your time to take a gander.
Meanwhile, as I reported last week, Governor Jack Dalrymple is meeting with legislative leaders today and is expected to make a decision regarding a special legislative session afterward.
Democrats have been agitating for a special session, as they do seemingly every election year, but this time by accident or design they seem to have a point. Republicans have been reticent about a special session, hoping to make do with across-the-board spending cuts and infusions of cash from state reserve funds, but at this point most the lawmakers I’ve spoken to who were previously against a special session seem resigned to one now.
House Majority Leader Al Carlson told me on Friday that he hoped to present Dalrymple with a plan to avoid a special session, including the use of more budget allotments and reserve funds, but he sounded doubtful about the success of that plan.
The rumored dates for the session are August 1-3.
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