The conventional way of evaluating the performance of the Glynn County economy in 2024 is to compare Glynn’s 2024 economic numbers to its 2023 numbers. The Glynn economy’s 2024 performance looks pretty good if evaluated that way.
Evaluate that performance by considering features of the world in which it happened, and the performance of the Glynn economy in 2024 looks nothing short of remarkable.
First, the conventional approach. 2023 was a big year for the Glynn economy. For that matter, so was 2022. 2024 was a slight variation of the two.
Preliminary estimates indicate that from December 2023 to December 2024, Glynn’s labor force increased by 1.1%, Glynn employment increased by 0.6%, and the difference in the two percentages nudged the county’s unemployment rate up from 2.5% to 2.9%.
As one-year percentage changes go, labor force growth of 1.1% is strong, and employment growth of 0.6% is respectable. An unemployment rate below 4% is terrific, below 3% is exceptional.
Hospitality and tourism activity in fiscal year 2024 was off by a mere 0.2% from a booming, record-shattering fiscal year 2023. The dip in hospitality and tourism activity was partially offset by a 0.2% increase in inflation-adjusted retail sales in 2024. Building permits for residential construction increased from 786 in 2023 to 910 in 2024, while the valuation of those projects increased from $251.7 million to $278.3 million. The Port of Brunswick turned in a monster year in 2024, with 22% jump in auto and machinery units processed from 2023.
On that basis, the Glynn economy posted a pretty good performance in 2024.
That performance happened in a world shaped by February 23, 2020, when Italy attempted to contain a massive outbreak of coronavirus by locking down eleven towns. The news caused a global financial panic, which became a global financial meltdown when markets opened on March 16. Financial institutions and investors buried markets in sell orders in a mad rush for cash; liquidity in the global financial system all but evaporated.
To stem the meltdown and fortify banks through the pandemic, the Federal Reserve and other central banks purchased trillions of dollars in securities. From late February to mid-July 2020, the assets on the Fed’s balance sheet increased from $4.17 trillion to $7.13 trillion. The figure reached $8.95 trillion in April 2022.
Meanwhile, the pandemic raged.
From 2015 thru 2019, the U.S. money supply increased at an average annual rate of 5.6%. The Fed’s emergency measures to stem the meltdown caused the U.S. money supply to increase by 26.5% from February 2020 to February 2021, and 10.9% from February 2021 to February 2022, which tallies to an increase of 40.4% from February 2020 to February 2022. That caused the 12-month rate of inflation to increase from 1.4% in January 2021 to 9.1% in June 2022.
The Fed responded to the inflation with aggressive monetary tightening, raising its key interest rate from 0.15% to 5.4% in a series of steps between March 2022 and July 2023. It held the rate at 5.4% for the next 17 months. In years past, monetary tightening of that magnitude would all but guarantee a recession.
In short, the features of the world we might want to consider in evaluating the performance of the Glynn economy in 2024 are: the deadly pandemic, the surge of inflation, and two-plus years of aggressive monetary tightening, all back-to-back-to-back within a span of five years. For the Glynn economy to deliver, in the teeth of all that, the year it delivered in 2024, is nothing short of remarkable.
Reg Murphy Center