Colorado biz leaders more confident in U.S. economy than state

BOULDER — For the first time in two decades, Colorado business leaders are feeling less confident in the near-term prospects for the state economy than they are for the national economy as a whole. 

“We’ve hardly ever seen that,” Richard Wobbekind, senior economist and faculty director of the Business Research Division at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, said Tuesday during a conversation with reporters about the recently released Leeds Business Confidence Index for the first quarter of 2025.

The index rose 3.3 points from the fourth quarter of last year to a score of 50. An LBCI score — which is based on impressions of the state economy, national economy, industry sales, industry profits, industry hiring and capital expenditures — of 50 is neutral. 

Colorado business leaders gave the national economy a confidence score of 50.3 and the state economy a score of 50.1.

The last time the LBCI recorded an inversion in the state-national confidence balance was 2005, “an era when the state was sort of lagging the nation coming out of the tech recession” of the early 2000s, CU Business Research Division executive director Brian Lewandowski said.

Wobbekind speculated that the reason for the confidence shift could be because “there’s a little bit more certainty to the national economy than there is about the state economy coming out of the election.”

As a possible source of uncertainty for business people he pointed to recent news reports about the potential pressure President-elect Donald Trump’s administration could put on industries such as climate technology, which has an outsized presence in Colorado.

The prospects of an extended period of slower job growth could be another culprit for making LBCI survey respondents antsy about the Colorado economy.

For the better part of two decades, Colorado has celebrated its position as one of the nation’s fastest-growing economies, but that is no longer the case.

“Slower growth … may be the new reality for Colorado as population growth, especially through net migration, remains slow, creating headwinds for labor force and job growth,”  according to the 60th annual Colorado Business Economic Outlook report, which was compiled by the Business Research Division and unveiled last month at a forum in Denver. 

The Centennial State “has demonstrated one of the strongest economies over the medium-term horizon. Comparing growth from 2008-2023, Colorado has the 5th-fastest real GDP and employment growth rates, 6th-fastest population and labor force growth rates, 3rd-fastest personal income and per capita personal income growth rates, and the highest home-price appreciation in the country,” the outlook report said. “Over the short term, though, Colorado’s performance has slipped in the rankings, demonstrating the difficulty in maintaining growth for a sustained period of time.”

While the LBCI index score increased from last quarter, that doesn’t necessarily indicate a consensus among business leaders that things are looking up, Lewandowski said. 

“What we saw was a pretty wide distribution of positive and negative expectations,” he said, with confident respondents and pessimistic respondents cancelling one another out, resulting in an overall neutral score. 

The new presidential regime was top of mind for many LBCI respondents, with “(b)usiness leaders express(ing) optimism about proposed regulatory and energy policy changes and concerns about tariffs, immigration policy, foreign policy, and health care policy changes,” the index report said. 

While the president-elect might be the same person as eight years ago, the level of confidence among Colorado business people is markedly different. 

The overall LBCI score for the first quarter of 2017, when Trump first took office after the November 2016 election, was 60.3, more than 10 points higher than the current score. The confidence score of the national economy was 60.3, and for the state economy it was 60.3.

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