Name: USG's CEO Has Some Good News About the Housing Market
Uploaded: 2016-04-14
Duration: 2 min 56 s
Description: And the economy

Jim, your business depends a lot on housing and construction. When you look at home sales and home building, how are they doing these days? Home building is doing quite well but it's coming off a very low cycle. If you look at 2008 and 2009, housing got to a all time low. It got down to 500, 000. So it's building it's way back. Last year was about a million one. So it's coming back, but it's still in its early stages. . We know that Americans, more of them, are getting jobs. Unemployment rate is going down. And that usually means that people feel better about buying a home. Do you see that activity picking up now? Yeah, all the demographics there. People are still having babies. Which is great. The values of homes are going up, employment is getting better. The Millenians are feeling better about their job situation. They're tired of living with their parents. The overall trend in housing, we think, is very, very positive. And when you look at various parts of the country, because you're supplying all the construction companies, what areas are hot and what's not? Well you know what's interesting, it is a very localized business, but I like to refer to it as the golden horseshoe. If you think of the United States, you have the Silicone Valley down through California, Arizona, Texas, just think of that horseshoe and up the east coast. So that part of the country has been very, very strong. So that golden horseshoe Is very, very strong, really up through New York here. You can see all the cranes that are happening in the city here. The Midwest has been kinda, I call it a Steady Eddie, not the peaks and the valleys. So there really isn't an area in the United States that really slow. There's just areas that are much more robust than others. How would you describe the health of the US economy right now? I think it's stable. I think it's stable. If you look at other economies relatively speaking, we're in good shape. I mean we obviously have a lot of issues in the economy. People worried about healthcare and corporate income tax and things of that nature but All in all, I think we have a pretty solid future. And yet presidential candidate Donald Trump says we're in for a very massive recession. So are things getting better or are they getting worse? I think that in our industry, our projections are the next few years are gonna be strong. So restaurants Hotels are being built, highrises are being built. So people have to live somewhere. So in our part of the economy, construction, we think the next few years are gonna be very, very solid. There's no indication, anything, that gives you a doubt that there could be a recession, whether it's massive or not. Any kind of sever slowdown? Well, I'm not an economist, I'm just gonna focus on our business, and I think our business is gonna be solid the next few years. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]