KALAMAZOO, MI (WHTC-AM/FM) – The West Michigan economy is “a train wreck in slow motion.”
That’s according to Dr. Brian Long, the Director of Supply Chain Management Research at Grand Valley State University, who canvasses purchasing managers in the Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo areas during the last two weeks of each month to comprise his monthly “Current Business Trends” report. The new orders and production indices in March both fell sharply to just over a positive number, while business confidence in the short term plummeted far below the break-even point, all due to COVID-19.
“The data we collected in the latter part of March doesn’t really tell us much of anything, because our data turned slightly negative,” he admitted during his monthly interview on “WHTC Morning News,” “but nothing like the month we’re going to turn in in just a few days. We’re probably going to have our sharpest downturn in the 40-year history of this survey.”
Dr. Long doesn’t believe that the crisis “will not be completely over until we have a vaccine … and unfortunately, this crisis is still just beginning.”
