37th Annual Corporate Survey: Economic Pressures Exerting Greatest Effect on Decision-Makers

As the nation began to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022, companies were still faced with a multitude of challenges. Supply chain bottlenecks and labor shortages persisted. And as the Federal Reserve attempted to rein in rising prices — with inflation peaking at 9.1 percent in June 2022 — the economy slowed down and worries surfaced about an impending recession.

By the end of last year, rate hikes had brought inflation down to 6.5 percent, still more than three times the Fed’s 2 percent target. Unemployment, which had peaked during the pandemic (13 percent in the second quarter of 2020), registered just 3.5 percent as of December 2022 — the lowest rate since 1969! — indicating an extremely tight labor market for companies looking to hire. However, consumers — buoyed by plentiful jobs and slowly decreasing prices — continued to spend.

Read the complete article from Area Development here.