With Twin Cities' employment growth below the national average and predictions that the recession will last another 22 months, a recent triple-A bond rating has given Anoka County reason for encouragement.
"If you can borrow money, it's better than raising taxes now," Scott Anderson, senior economist and vice president of Wells Fargo, told the Anoka County board Tuesday.
Anoka County, faced with the possibility of eliminating programs and hoping to avoid layoffs, earned a coveted triple-A rating last week that gives the county's bond sales negotiator new leverage "dealing with a market that's created much nervousness," said County Board Chairman Dennis Berg.
Anderson, a nationally sought expert who writes several monthly national and international reports for Wells Fargo, said the Twin Cities can expect an additional 3 percent decline in payrolls and another 10 percent decline in home prices. The unemployment rate in the Twin Cities area could rise to 8 percent, he said.
Through the gloomy predictions, Anderson offered words of encouragement.
"In many ways, we were living beyond our means ... and now we're getting back to fundamental values," he said. It's been "almost a necessary process of painful destruction," he said.
"In the long term, we're going to be better off," he said of an expected return to a "more substantial" pace of consumer spending.
PAUL LEVY
