With Election Day approaching and 2016 coming to a close, what is the state of our economy?

“All things considered, the economy’s doing pretty well,” said NC Bankers Association economist Harry Davis, delivering the keynote address at the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce’s annual Economic Outlook Briefing last week. “It’s not great – we’ve had much better growth in the ’80s, the ’90s, and the ’60s – but it is a long recovery.

“So it’s like a mule – it just keeps prodding along.”

He says economic growth has been slow through the entire recovery, about 2 percent per year since 2009 – and growth has been even slower this year, closer to 1.6 or 1.7 percent. But personal incomes and consumer spending are growing at a faster rate, about 3 percent – and the unemployment rate will remain steady at around 5 percent for the foreseeable future, both in North Carolina and nationwide.

And Davis says in spite of the slow growth, the Federal Reserve will definitely raise interest rates in December – for a very simple reason.

“There are no months left in this year,” he says. “So they have to raise them (in December), because they’ve been telling everybody all year they were going to raise them.”

View a slideshow of Davis’ full presentation.

Davis’ conclusion: North Carolina’s economy is growing at a slightly faster rate than the national economy. But it won’t continue to grow forever: Davis says to expect a recession sometime around the end of 2017.

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