LA doing well?

Los Angeles Is Having a Loud Economic Boom

A good economic report, well done and makes the case that LA outperforms.  Let us look a little in the fine print.

The report talks about a city office inspired upgrade to the LA airport, increasing capacity.  This is an endowment effect, LA is the pacific port to Asia. LA had a 2.5% population growth and benefits from the westward migration still. So LA will outperform the population losers from the North East.

LA is just now catching up from is historically higher unemployment rates.  That may be more due to pension stampede.

From the report we have rates:

That's proving to be a winning message in the bond market, where the City of Los Angeles Department of Airports municipal debt handed investors a 5.6-percent return during the past 12 months. That performance in income plus appreciation easily beat the 4.6 percent average of U.S. issuers, including California, at 4.2 percent. It also exceeded the return on national airport municipal debt, 4.4 percent, and on transportation bonds, 4.3 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Those rates are very high, not something the municipalities want a lot of. Some of that return becomes tax losses for the federal government, making the analysis more complex as there is no net gain.

Otherwise, yes, the Mayor does well. I gave him A- on his camp town construction. He is not directly liable for the teachers strike, the state legislature caused those problems.