June 22, 2026

The below transcript is a translation of the podcast audio that has been machine generated by Adobe Podcast.

Derek Stanley We need to know which states have a younger population because we want to know where that workforce is going to be, because the 2030s are going to be a period of general decline over a period of roughly six to seven years.

Taylor St. Germain Hi, everyone. This is Taylor Saint Germain with ITR economics. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of TrendsTalk. We at ITR are your apolitical and unbiased source of economic intelligence. And today I have my colleague Derek back with me. Many of you remember Derek from our last 2030 conversation, and I’m bringing him in intentionally here. We hosted our 2030 Executive series webinar on the states of opportunity as we think about our path forward leading up to the 2030s. So I thought this was a great time to bring Derek back on to debrief what Connor and Grace, our two colleagues, covered in this latest ITR Executive Series webinar. And just a note for everyone out there, if you didn’t miss the June 17th webinar, we have a rerecording, a rebroadcast, if you will, of this coming up on June 25th. So there’s time for you to jump back in, and there’ll actually be a live Q&A at the end of that as well with Grace back with you all. So if you did miss out on this, there’s another opportunity to watch it and ask Grace, our managing director, some live questions. So I wanted to throw that out there. There’ll be a link in the TrendsTalk episode for you to access that as well. But I wanted to kick things off before I bring Derek in here, just summarizing what this conversation was about. Again, as many of you know from listening to me on TrendsTalk and my ITR colleagues over the years, we are projecting this 2030 depression, and we’ve been projecting that for quite some time. And while we’ve often talked about this downturn from a macro economic level, we really wanted to bring it down to the state level because there are going to be certain US states that are outperforming others. And that was the title of this of this webinar was Winning US States for the 2030s. So I’ll give you all a few teasers here before Derek and I discuss, we really looked at five pillars in terms of determining which states are going to be most resilient during this 2030 downturn. Those five pillars were population resiliency, consumer resiliency, macroeconomic resiliency, recession resiliency, and fiscal resiliency. So those were the five primary pillars that our data team, our research team focused on as it related to understanding which states will likely perform better than others. Given those five pillars, we did identify the least risk places to be, the most at risk. I’ll just give you a quick snapshot of that. The five least risk places to be in order 1 through 5 were Nebraska, Utah, South Dakota, Montana and Idaho, the most at risk places from 51 to 47, so the worst first here, going down to the fifth worst was Mississippi, Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio and Alabama. So just a little teaser for you all. There was so much more that went into this webinar. We really went into each of these five pillars, how each state were performing or ranked relative to these five pillars. This is really important to Derek and I and the team at ITR, for our construction clients, for our consumer related clients, and for many of you out there personally. It’s not everything is equal state by state here in the US, and there are some states that are more immune to downturns relative to others. And so I was really happy our team put this together. But Derek, I wanted to transition over to you and just what were some of the main highlights? How are you thinking generally about the information that Grace, Connor, and the team presented here?

Derek Stanley Yeah of course. Well, Taylor, obviously, thank you for having me back here. And a huge shout out to our entire team who put a lot of work into this. So this has been building for a while. We’ve had clients who have been asking us for the regional breakdown. This is a big step in that direction, we’re going to go even further with it from here. So Taylor, you highlighted the five pillars that we went over today. All of them, I think are very important because we like to follow where the people are going. Because whether you’re regional or whether you’re a business that has a national reach, we need to know which states have a younger population because we want to know where that workforce is going to be, because the 2030s are going to be a period of general decline over a period of roughly six to seven years. But then we’re going to have a rebound. And if you are in business at that point, if you’re trying to find ways to expand your business from that point, you need to have access to people who can do the work. So finding out where those pockets of opportunity are huge. I would say for me directly, one thing that caught my eye was the financial or fiscal resiliency on a state level. I have to point out that I am currently in the state of Connecticut. I love Connecticut, it’s been my home for years. My family is here, I went to college here, I met my wife here. But we were on the naughty list for the fiscal resiliency or I should say, fiscal responsibility. Unfunded pension liabilities, we’ve made progress towards that. But that’s a pitfall that certain states are going to have to mitigate when we get into the 2030s, because we are going to see economic pain that could affect tax revenue trends, that could affect a lot of things. And this exercise was about going through every single state, looking at those four pillars and weeding out the risk factors. And some states were generally off the radar in this case. Some of them, like Connecticut, for example, showed up as a potential red flag in that one category. There’s a lot of them that were highlights. I have clients that operate in Utah, and Utah was on the nice list quite a few times as we went through this presentation today. So it doesn’t mean that, you know, like just for example, like a state like Utah or Idaho are going to be the, the beacon of hope during the 2030s, but they are just better positioned to weather the storm during that time. Grace and Connor also pointed out that some of these states that were highlighted as areas of opportunities are not the largest states in the country. We have California, Texas, Florida, New York, those are some of the biggest states by GDP. So we have to keep that in mind. Doesn’t mean that, you know, you can just drop what you’re doing in Texas, for example, during the 2030s and jump to Idaho and all is well in the world. that’s not the case, you know, it’s about diversification. We’ve talked about diversification for a long time, different industries, different geographies, which was the point of going over all this today, kind of spreading out your risks in a way that will help you mitigate decline and position yourselves to edge out the competition on the backside of the business cycle, roughly around 2036, 2037.

Taylor St. Germain Yeah. And, you know, a lot of the things that you brought up here, Derek, are important. It’s, you know, I don’t know what your plan is with your family, but we’re not telling people that are in Connecticut, you know, you have to run away from Connecticut. But if there’s some other states that surround you that might provide better business opportunity, it might be worth diversifying into some of those states, like you mentioned. The other thing is, if you’re in Connecticut and you plan on being there, well, you know what the storm looks like that’s coming. It gives you a little bit more of a perspective on, okay, we know it might be a little bit more challenging in Connecticut. How do we take steps personally and professionally to prepare? And so that’s the angle that I like that Connor and Grace took. We’re not saying, you know, everyone run from Connecticut, Hawaii or California just because they end up on the naughty list for a lot of these pillars here. But it helps you better prepare your business, again, financially and from a positioning standpoint on, on what’s to come. And, you know, I like that you called out fiscal resiliency. I do think that’s very important. You know, one of the, the trends that stood out to me was under the third pillar that was presented. It was population resiliency. And I know, Derek, you referred to this in your description there, but there was a really interesting chart that I think will impact our construction clients a lot, and Grace and Connor took a look at permitting trends over a ten year period of time. So between 2015 and 2025, what did permit growth look like? And they made a point that really stood out to me. This is about forty minutes into to the recording here, and it was that a state like Illinois came in basically flat. So from 2015 to 2025, Illinois essentially offered you no permitting growth. And that’s crazy to think about as a construction company. Now, again, I’m sure construction companies still benefited financially from inflation, from higher material costs, so the dollars look better. But it’s very interesting to look at Illinois, which was flat over essentially a ten year period. And if you look at their neighbors next door, Indiana was up 49.4%. So you go from a flat state to just moving across the border to a state that’s up 50% over a ten year period of time. And I think these are the trends that businesses will really want to hang on to as they think about how to best prepare for the 2030. So just a few examples that that Derek and I are providing you all with, you know, some of the great information that came out of this. And again, folks, we’re encouraging you to take a look at the rebroadcast on June 25th if you missed that, and certainly reach out to our team because we’re just scratching the surface here. You know, we our first stop was to take a look at the states that are going to perform well, but we can get a lot of this data down to the county, down to the MSA level. So there’s a lot of ways we can slice and dice this data to really help you all prepare for the 2030s. And, you know, I guess as Derek and I really close this episode, I just wanted to highlight folks, we still have three and a half years of economic growth before this 2030 downturn is upon us. So there is still time to prepare. But time is of the essence, as they like to say. Three and a half years is a good window, but it takes a lot of time to pivot your business or diversify into new markets or look at new locations. So the decisions we’re making today are absolutely going to impact how we are performing as we move into the 2030s. Connor and Grace did close with some industries of opportunity, and Derek and I covered a lot of those industries on the last conversation that we had. So there’s a lot of great nuggets in there for you all. And so again, folks, I just wanted to remind you all again, June 25th, there’ll be a link in the description of this TrendsTalk episode, rebroadcast with a live Q&A with our managing director, Grace, at the end, so please check that out. Also, reach out to Derek and myself on LinkedIn, head over to our company website, we’re happy to have more conversations with you about how you can apply this information more to your specific company level. But for now, Derek, thanks for being here again. Thanks, everyone for joining us on this episode of TrendsTalk. Please like and subscribe to TrendsTalk wherever you listen to your podcasts. And we look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Thanks so much and take care for now.