The Park City Chamber/Bureau is hosting its annual economic Update and Entrepreneurial Spirit Luncheon next Thursday. In addition to a mid-season economic update from Chamber Bureau President and CEO Bill Malone, Monica Mehta, a financial expert, will be giving the keynote address.
Monica Mehta earns her living as an investor working out of Texas and New York. She is visible on a number of national television programs – everything from Fox News to the Bill Mahre Show. She also writes columns for Bloomberg Business Week and others. Next week in Park City Mehta says she’ll talk about the economy and what the outlook is, according to her view, for 2020.
“We’re not only getting into the new year, Mehta said, “we’re going into a new decade. And there’s a lot to learn from the decade that past. The 2010s were a pretty big decade for the U.S. just globally – the stock market killed it. And now going into the next 10 years can we expect similar output from the U.S. globally? Can we expect the stock market to continue to rise as it’s risen for the last 10 years? We’re 11 years int the 2nd longest bull market in history. If you had invested a dollar in 2009, you’d have $6. So that has had a huge trickle effect to so many important aspects of the economy and so we’re going to talk about what we can expect going in into the next year and the next decade.
While the stock market and economy have done well, the same can’t be said for small business owners. Over the last ten years, money has been cheap to borrow – if you can get it. That money isn’t available to small businesses as it is for large corporations. After financial crisis, Mehta says there was a lot of new regulation put in place. One of the unintended consequences was a lack of access to capital for small business owners and created a superpower for the really big businesses in ways that the smaller guys she says just can’t keep up.
“So, a little fact that kinds of puts it into perspective - from the 1980’s to today, we actually have a 40% decline in small biz starts across America,” Mehta said. “So, while in so many ways we hear about these tech companies that are exploding and turning into $5 billion $10 billion $15 billion companies, the tech companies call those unicorns - just like unicorns it’s a little bit of myth and fiction. It’s happening in very special cases, but for the small business owner, for the mom and pop, for the person who wants to make an income on their own, it’s actually gotten much harder to start a business and sustain a business over the last few decades.”
Monica Mehta is the keynote speaker at the annual Park City Chamber Bureau Economic Forecast Luncheon happening next Thursday. Members can make reservations or get more information under the member tab at visitparkcity.org.
https://www.visitparkcity.com/members/chamber-bureau-events/rsvp/?action=details&eventid=1698
