Experts: Recovery Is a Work in Progress

NEWARK-”It will take a serious bipartisan effort to turn things around in New Jersey,” economist James Hughes told a gathering of business execs at the Newark Regional Business Partnership’s economic forecast event here yesterday. “This decade could be the first since the 1930s–the Great Depression–with fewer private sector jobs in the state at the end of the decade than at the beginning.

“The state has lost 14,000 jobs so far this year, but more are likely to come,” said Hughes, who is the Dean of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. He termed the current situation a relatively mild, “slow-motion recession,” and how it plays out will depend on the financial markets.

“Correcting all of Wall Street’s excesses will take a considerable amount of time,” he said. “Those excesses will continue to reverberate in New Jersey,” and that reverberation could come in the form of everything from consumer retrenchment, with sales tax revenues taking a hit as a result, to cutbacks in the W/D supply chain sector.