Business is great almost everywhere you look in the construction industry.
On May 1, I had the honor of being inducted as president of the Construction Writers Association (CWA) at their 40th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. Participating in that meeting was an all-star cast of guest speakers connected in some manner to the construction industry. A more upbeat group would be hard to find outside of a postgame championship locker room.
"Where are the imbalances that will derail this expansion?" was the rhetorical question put by F. W. Dodge chief economist Robert Murray. "They are hard to find at the moment," he answered himself. Murray told CWA that the nation continues on a path of "strong GDP [Gross Domestic Product] growth without inflation. The question for 1998 is, will there be an impact from Asia? Nobody knows, but there's no smoking gun yet for inflationary pressures that would cause the Fed to tighten up."