First Word: All Arrows Point Up

Jack Rogers
Jack Rogers
Editor in Chief
Business Facilities

By Jack Rogers
From the July/August 2014 issue

The world may appear to be coming apart at the seams, but that rumbling sound you’re hearing in America doesn’t herald imminent destruction. It’s the mightiest economic engine on Earth roaring back to life.

The U.S. economy recorded a robust four percent growth rate for the second quarter of 2014. Now that the posers in Congress have given up on shutting everything down, we anticipate ignition will be followed by liftoff and the big Saturn V will rise, fueled by about $2 trillion in capital that skittish investors and large corporations have been waiting five years to spend.

Which makes this the perfect time to take a close look at the states and metros that have positioned themselves to ride the Recovery rocket to new heights. There’s no better place to find out who’s got the right stuff than Business Facilities’ 10th Annual Rankings Report.

We’re not giving you anything special for the anniversary edition of our economic development scorecard, just more of the same: the most comprehensive, fairly evaluated and informative rankings you can find anywhere. As usual, we’ve added some new categories and refined our criteria.

The competition was fierce, and we’ll admit there were a couple of categories that tempted us to flip a coin. But we kept it in our pocket, crunched the numbers and analyzed every tea leaf we could get our hands on instead.

The results are in and it’s time to find out who’s on top and who’s not.