From the Roundtable: Potential for inflation outweighs lack of consumer confidence

The timing couldn’t have been better. The interaction of Missouri Finance Commissioner Eric McClure with a group of area bankers at the latest Columbia Business Times Power Lunch on Tuesday provided considerable insight into what we’ve been through and maybe what we should be planning for.

Stocks go up and stocks go down. As this is written, the markets seem to be gaining ground but that doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods. While the latest review of area banks shows them to be generally safe and sound-with the exception of one institution with a seemingly large portfolio of non-performing loans-various federal agencies working in concert with corresponding entities overseas have moved expeditiously. They are putting plenty of fingers in the dikes while we all softly tiptoe past the graveyard of depressions past hoping not to waken ghosts of earlier financial debacles.

While luxuriating in the extended and expanding balm of federal security backing deposits and a growing catalogue of other assurances, several salient concerns voiced during the CBT banking forum need to be watched. The good news is the responsible manner by which our area banking institutions have operated and have pledged to continue to operate anchored to a relatively stable economy based on education, health care, regional retailing, insurance, light industry and governmental services. If there’s a sour note, it’s within the historically unheralded construction and housing sector.

Locally, there’s concern over the sluggish growth of the overall deposit base among banks tallied most recently at the disappointing level of less than 2 percent annually. More globally, considerable concern was voiced about the specter of runaway inflation tied to buying ourselves out of this mess. Then there are the usual post-election economic uncertainties anytime a new president is elected. Both candidates are positing their campaigns around “change”-a word many finance people eschew.

There was universal agreement that not only the United States, but much of the world itself, has spent its way into one heck of an economic mess and that it may take a number of years and prodigious volumes of cash and economic relief before we work our way out of this one.

Bad news from elsewhere travels with electronic rapidity these days, and this ends up draining consumer confidence when really there’s far less to be gloomy about. While the “workout” may take longer than we want it to and it will be most painful here in the housing and construction field, it’s the potential for inflation that I’m worried about. We’ve been living high on the hog in America, and there are going to be consequences as recovery takes hold.

Reservoir could help with city’s future water needs

When it comes to a city’s supply water needs, I’ve always felt more comfortable knowing there’s a visible body of water such as a river, lake or reservoir to gaze upon. After the Academic Hall fire on the University of Missouri campus in January 1892 and the feeble effort to extinguish it, the city fathers knew they had to come up with a steady, reliable supply of water if they wanted the university to stay here while Sedalia lusted for this prize.

This photo from 1900 shows the dam and reservoir on Hinkson Creek just east of Stephens Lake Park that went up a few years after the fire to supply those needs until a series of artesian wells eventually took over. To me, one of Columbia’s principal deficits has been that there’s no substantial body of water close by. While there are a few baby-sized lakes and ponds here, I mean a real lake and that’s what Columbia doesn’t have.

Although it’s important that voters approve the water revenue bond initiative on the November ballot, I want to be on the record favoring any activity that leads to the creation and development of a reservoir for the region’s future water supply requirements.

Staring at the trace of Cedar Creek in Boone and Callaway counties-part of it in the Mark Twain National Forest-on U.S. Geological Survey sectional maps leads me to wonder about building a dam where the creek narrows thereby creating a reservoir a mile or two wide and a number of miles long.

While this would be “over the dead body” of various agencies and the usual persistent chorus of public obstructionists, water is more than just a run of the mill commodity. Water is a necessity and it would be in the public interest to dam the Cedar, for a joint Boone-Cole-Callaway County water supply reservoir may eventually overwhelm the opposition some day. Other uses such as fishing and recreation must remain sotto voce for now. But what a pleasant fillip for the area such a reservoir would be.

Al Germond is the host of the “Columbia Business Times Sunday Morning Roundtable” every Sunday at 8:15 a.m. on kfru. He can be reached at [email protected].