Ken Dixon: View from the bottom with bottom-line crowd

People's United Financial economist John Traynor speaks at Fairfield University on November 2016. People's United Financial economist John Traynor speaks at Fairfield University on November 2016. Photo: Alexander Soule / Hearst Connecticut Media Photo: Alexander Soule / Hearst Connecticut Media Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Ken Dixon: View from the bottom with bottom-line crowd 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

The suits were dark and stuffed overwhelmingly with middle-aged white men. Were there 20 women in the crowd of 200? Maybe.

There were so many Audis outside the Charles Dolan Business School and the satellite parking lots around Fairfield University the other day that as I wandered in, I could nearly hear the drip, drip, drip from their poorly designed valve covers.

But, you know, luxury.

It was the 9th annual economic forum hosted by the previously unknown-to-me entities called the Connecticut Turnaround Management Association, the Association for Corporate Growth, the Fairfield County Chapter of the Exit Planning Exchange, and the Connecticut chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors.

So, to say the audience was bottom-line-oriented might just about peg it in three words and a couple of hyphens.

I was there waiting for Gov. Ned Lamont to make yet another pitch in his quest to bring back toll roads to the state after a more than 30-year hiatus. He’s had worse receptions. I mean, no one with a hand-crocheted “No Tolls” hat photo-bombed him on this occasion.

In the well-heeled crowd, an extra dollar-a-day for tolls on their commutes is worth a lot less than the daily drips of Valvoline from their Quattros’ headgaskets.

But when people from these kinds of wonkish organizations get together, heck, I’ll take whatever someone with a modicum of economic credibility offers. These people actually do something, I’ll imagine, and know stuff, compared with the 187-member General Assembly, where good ideas, if they don’t die, are held in animated suspension, like snow globes, for years.

Remember when Connecticut was in the forefront of banning drivers’ use of hand-held cell phones back in 2005? That bill was introduced annually for seven years before it was finally approved. Steady habits? Ha!

So I’m sitting in the front row of the room waiting for the wisdom.

Up comes John Traynor, chief investment officer at People’s United Bank, which is responsible for most of the scenic silhouette of Bridgeport, with the Oz-like, 16-story, 30-year-old bank headquarters, designed by Richard Meier, the internationally celebrated architect who resigned from his own firm after a cascade of sexual-abuse claims, but now is apparently back, or maybe never left.

Traynor’s ice-breaker, 15 seconds in, kind of puts the crowd into perspective.

“You know, looking out at this audience, I just want to say one thing,” Traynor quips: “Pray that Elizabeth Warren doesn’t walk in right now, because you are all sources of revenue.” The guffaws roll over the room. Well, what would the Audi service centers do without them?

The crowd is there for Traynor’s economic slide show. Yep, the graph of wage growth that shows the nation is close to the 4 percent that could signal the next recession; the inverse yield curve, where if two-year Treasury notes get higher interest than the 10-years, the inevitable market downturn is imminent.

Then there is the global GDP, pegged at 3 percent next year. It’s currently 3.5 percent. So what’s a half point worth? “Going from 3.5 percent global growth next year to 3 percent subtracts $700 billion in global GDP,” Traynor says, stressing that the International Monetary Fund estimates a third of that will be from fewer ships sailing back and forth between the United States and China.

“Two-thirds of that is basically the rest of us in this room saying ‘you know what, we ought to hold off, we’re not going to invest in a new factory, I’m not going to expand,’” Traynor said. “It’s deferred purchases because of a lack of confidence.”

The next slide shows that U.S. presidents going back to Lyndon Johnson who won second terms presided over economies where disposal income increased 1.4 percent and above. Currently it is at 2.05 percent.

“If the president wants to get re-elected he needs to solve the tariff issues with China,” Traynor says. “He needs to keep the economy going, because this is what he needs to get re-elected. This is the key for his re-election.”

Next slide is Connecticut. March of 1989 until today, Connecticut added just 19,900 jobs.

“That’s not per year, that’s in total and basically most of those jobs have come basically in the last 12 months, so that gives you a sense of what’s taken place,” he says. “It’s been a long time coming since we really shot ourselves in the foot.” Only 85 percent of the jobs lost in the Great Recession have come back.

While Connecticut has minus-9 percent GDP growth, Massachusetts is more than 16 percent in the positive, with New York nearly 13 percent positive.

“The asset here in New England that Massachusetts has harnessed and Connecticut needs to, is that intellectual capital,” the banker concludes on a vaguely optimistic note. “We have tremendous assets that are gonna set us up for really good growth going forward.”

kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT