Texas Redux, America Restrained - Richard Fisher Speeches, 2-15-2012 via FRB Dallas

Thank you, Lee [Graham] for that kind introduction.

This morning I would like to provide an overview of the Texas economy as we see it from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and then draw some inferences for the nation as a whole.

Texas Redux
In a nutshell, Texas continues on a path it has been on for over two decades, outperforming the nation in economic growth and job expansion. We have fully recovered the jobs lost during the Great Recession and have punched through previous peak employment levels.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the arbiter of when recessions begin and end, dates the onset of the Great Recession as December 2007. The economic performance of Texas since December 2007 can be summarized with the chart being projected on the screen. It depicts employment growth in the 12 Federal Reserve districts. In the Eleventh Federal Reserve District―or the Dallas Fed’s district—96 percent of the economic production comes from the 25.7 million people of Texas. As you can see by the red line, we now have more people at work than we had before we felt the effects of the Great Recession. All told, in 2011, Texas created 212,000 jobs.[1]

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