COVID-19 in Colorado

Last week lawmakers in Illinois wrote a letter requesting a $41 Billion federal bailout to help shore up their state budget woes. Roughly ¼ of that request, or $10 Billion, was to go directly to the state pensions fund. For years, Illinois has suffered from declining...

Newly released modeling from the Reason Foundation indicates that if PERA experiences a -10% annual return on their investment portfolio, it would add $7 Billion to its current $30 Billion unfunded liability. To pay off this increase in the unfunded liabilities, a...

New claims for unemployment insurance in Colorado continued to climb for the 5th straight week. 67,334 new claims were made during the week ending April 18, bringing the 5-week total of new claims to 298,944. However, the weekly claims were down from over 104,000 the...

On Monday April 20, Governor Polis held a press conference to discuss several of his recent executive actions and the new policy guidelines Coloradans can expect for living with COVID-19. Executive Actions 1. The Governor shared his approach reopening the state in May...

This past Wednesday April 15th, Governor Polis announced broad principles that are guiding the decision on when and how to reopen the state’s economy. During his remarks he said, “As we reopen our state, we know that things will work differently than they did before,...

Earlier today, the new weekly unemployment insurance claims for the week ending April 11th were released. Colorado saw a record setting 105,000 new claims, surpassing the weekly record of just two weeks ago. This brings the total portion of the Colorado labor force...

Recent statement by the Colorado Speaker of the House K.C. Becker and a presentation developed by the Colorado Governor’s Office of State Planning and Budget paint a stark picture for the outlook of state finances.  They suggest that between $2B to $3.2 billion will...

What’s at the intersection of economic modeling and epidemiological modeling? Hopefully, the answers to what most of us are asking. How bad will this crisis get and when will the economy reopen? Recently, Governor Polis and Colorado public health officials addresses these questions. While nobody knows for sure, the latest modeling indicates that Colorado has either already reached its peak number of new cases, or it will come within the next few weeks.

The last 24 hours have brought about more unprecedented news.  Yesterday’s ruling by the state supreme court in a 4-3 decision, means that lawmakers will be allowed to resume the 2020 legislative session and retain the remaining 53 days on the calendar.  You can read...

CU Leeds School of Business just released their quarterly survey of over 400 Colorado business leaders.  While the confidence index dropped to the lowest level in the 17-year history of the survey, there may be indications it will rebound more quickly than in years...

Small businesses will likely be hit the hardest as a result of social distancing and public health guidelines.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimated that the US economy could lose roughly 14 million jobs by Summer of 2020.