Iowa native Darrell Cronk, who is currently president of the Wells Fargo Investment Institute in New York City, was in Des Moines recently. Coincidentally, his flight was among the last to land before air traffic was temporarily halted for Air Force One to arrive for another president’s visit. 

Cronk, who is also chief investment officer for Wells Fargo’s Wealth and Investment Management division, travels extensively around the country for presentations, and it’s equally useful for gathering anecdotal evidence about the economy’s health, he said. 

“Largely, I would say the sentiment and the surveys seems to show that people are feeling much better about the economy than even what some of the data has shown,” Cronk said. “So when we talk to corporate CEOs, CFOs and business owners, they tend to be fairly optimistic right now. Yes, there are always concerns, but if you actually get them in a room and ask, ‘How has your business been operating lately?’ most of them will say it’s been pretty good.”

Evidence of the healthy economy is also visible along the skylines of each of the metro areas he has visited in recent months, including downtown Des Moines’, he noted. 

“In almost every one of the major cities, it’s almost like cranes fighting on the skyline, there’s so much development and building going on,” said Cronk, who grew up in Elkhart and graduated from Iowa State University. “It doesn’t matter if it’s New York City or Atlanta or Nashville, Austin or Phoenix. I was in London two weeks ago, and it was the same thing in London.”  

Cronk finds it interesting that most of the construction appears to be added urban core housing — primarily high-end multifamily developments and condominiums filled by millennials and empty nesters.  

Because the economic recovery is nearly a decade old now, Cronk says he’s often asked if the overbuilt urban housing could generate the anticipated bubble that will lead to the next downturn.

“It’s not a bubble because there’s no leverage in the system,” he said. “If you think of 2006 and 2007, part of the problem was not people deciding they wanted to own two or three homes, but the fact that they borrowed precipitously to own those, which creates leverage in the system. Then when you get a downturn, that leverage becomes very problematic. That’s not the case today, both because of tighter regulations and that banks are choosing not to have the same easy lending standards they did in ’06 and ’07.”