good morning. good morning. my name is megan van hutton and i am the director of media and external communications here at the chamber. welcome to our annual labor day press briefing. first, i have up here randy johnson, our senior vice president for labor and employee benefits and jd foster, our senior vice president for economic policy and chief economist. they will each speak for about 15 minutes, and then we will open it up for q&a. and you can ask your questions then. so, without further a do, i will pass it over to jd foster. mr. foster: thank you for coming. it s a pleasure to have you with this. randy johnson.ue fromor those suffering hurricane harvey, we wish them on behalf of the chamber all the safety and the swiftest possible recovery from what they are dealing with. the economy is in its ninth year of expansion, which is fairly hisble, as that makes it third longest in the modern era. by next spring, we will have tied for second, and curiously, despite the leng
mr. foster: thank you for coming. it s a pleasure to have you with this. also my colleague randy johnson. and for those suffering from hurricane harvey, we wish them on behalf of the chamber all the safety and the swiftest possible recovery from what they are dealing with. the economy is in its ninth year of expansion, which is fairly notable, as that makes it his third longest in the modern era. by next spring, we will have tied for second, and curiously, despite the length of the recovery and expansion, we seem to be heading into acceleration. normally as the expansion goes along, the m the economy slows a bit. instead, we may have an acceleration, and the reason for that is somewhat in this chart. if you look down the far left hand side, there is that little dip that corresponds to the. corresponds to the period before the election. we have the 6% increase. they call that the trump bump. whether president trump really gets the credit for that is up to future historians