A recent confidence survey of Colorado business leaders paints a gloomy economic picture for the second quarter of 2026.
Many of the concerns — global instability; the war in Iran’s impact on energy prices; tariffs and immigration, for example — raised by respondents to the recent University of Colorado Leeds Business Confidence Index can be traced back to policy decisions in Washington.
On a national level, “it’s obviously an economy that’s fraught with so many different risks,” said Rich Wobbekind, CU economist and faculty director of the university’s Business Research Division. “The energy price risk, which has come up most recently, has been added to all of the other risks or unknowns that we had before: things like the impact of the tariffs, the impact of immigration changes, federal government restructuring and so on.”
Wobbekind continued: “People keep asking me this question, ‘Have you ever seen anything like this before?’” When the above headwinds are coupled with “very weak growth” in Colorado on the jobs front and demographic trends such as an aging population and less in-migration, “I think this really does present something quite different for the U.S. and state economies in terms of how we think about growth going forward both in output and employment.”
The Leeds Business Confidence Index (LBCI) —which measured the sentiment of 213 survey respondents in March on six categories: the state economy, national economy, industry sales, industry profits and industry hiring — dropped from 43.1 in the first quarter of the year to 41.9 ahead of the second quarter. An index score of 50 is neutral — a score below 50 suggests pessimism.
The second-quarter survey found “uniform weakness in every single category,” Wobbekind said.
Still, he said, CU economists are “not expecting … what we would call a traditional recession in the economy,” largely due to resiliency in consumption figures.
Both data and sentiment indicate that Colorado has dropped from one of the nation’s leading economies to one in the middle-to-bottom of the pack, BRD executive director Brian Lewandowski said.
When final labor figures are updated for 2025, Colorado’s employment growth could be revised down to zero, Wobbekind said, meanwhile “we continue to have slow growth forecasts for this year.”
