Juno may have wreaked a whole lot of trouble in your neighborhood, but we'll dig out of this within a few days. A more longer-lasting problem is what the storm might do to our economy. Last year's harsh winter ended up costing the region an awful lot of money.
A firm called Macroeconomic Advisers estimates that 2014's rough winter knocked about 1.4 percentage points off the nation's GDP in the first quarter, when the economy shrank by 2.1 percent. In part because of the weather, the first quarter was the weakest economically since the recession.
One of the biggest problems was that hiring hit a real slowdown while people were clearing away the snow. For the first quarter, the economy added an average of 163,000 jobs per month, as opposed to 246,000 for the rest of the year. We can only hope that Juno won't end up having a similar effect.
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