The May forecast will be released this morning at 8:30 am in Hearing Room A. The files will be posted to our main website at that time and you can view the release presentation online using the following link to the Legislature’s website. Click on “A” next to Capitol Hearing Room Video near the top of the page. A forecast summary blog post will be posted later today.
Oregon Legislature Website
http://www.leg.state.or.us/listn/
Office of Economic Analysis Website
http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/OEA/economic.shtml#Most_Recent_Forecast
Mark McMullen
Josh Lehner
Oregon Office of Economic Analysis 
A year and a half ago, Tom Potiowsky told the House and Senate revenue committees, “But I believe we have enough indicators that technically the recession has ended in Oregon or is about to,” while presenting his quarterly revenue forecast.
His estimated revenue forecasts for 2010-2011 from that statement have gone down, down and now back up?
03/01/10 6,822,659,000
06/01/10 6,703,208,000
09/01/10 6,351,465,000
12/01/10 6,414,661,000
03/01/11 6,424,857,000
After overestimating the revenue for Oregon on a continual basis for years, what event is going to get the OEA to modify their estimating matrices? I think I can guarantee that your current estimates for this year and future years revenues will be higher than realized.
By: Andy from Beaverton on May 12, 2011
at 1:53 PM
Andy from Beaverton,
While there is no official arbiter of state-level recessions, similar to the NBER at the national level, indicators and estimates are that Oregon’s recession ended in the summer of 2009, just like the nation overall. Yes, there were some further job losses after this date and sizable growth did not immediately resume, however the recessionary decline was more or less over. For example, let’s take July 2009 as the last month of the technical Oregon recession and look at job losses and the unemployment rate. Slightly more than 140,000 private sector job losses had resulted prior to this date, however private sector employment would decline another 10,000 through December 2009. These numbers show that approximately 93 percent of all private sector job losses during the recession had already been lost by the date the technical recession ended in the state. The unemployment rate in Oregon reached its peak level this business cycle of 11.6 percent in both May and June 2009 and has slowly declined since. Both of these measures indicate that the worst portions of the business cycle were over by the summer of 2009, and it is therefore a reasonable statement to claim that the technical recession ended over a year and a half ago.
As for the revenue estimates, those are the correct figures from our recent forecasts for total General Fund revenues for Fiscal Year 2011. Our office made two significant downward revisions in the past 6 or so forecasts. The June 2010 forecast’s downward revision was primarily attributable to lower than forecasted April personal income tax collections. The September 2010 forecast’s downward revision was primarily attributable to a slower, more pessimistic macroeconomic outlook for the future. Both of these circumstances, obviously, result in lower revenue estimates.
By: oregoneconomicanalysis on May 23, 2011
at 2:05 PM
Is this a public blog or what? I submitted a comment 11 days ago and it remains unapproved. I guess you don’t care what us little people have to say?
By: Andy from Beaverton on May 23, 2011
at 1:31 PM