health is threatened in the coming year as the old problem of declining manufacturing meets a new reality of stalling retail sales and a deteriorating construction market.
And the woes of the housing market are spreading into finance, witnessed by Bank of America’s announcement in November that it will close a 105-employee mortgage bundling office in Florence in early January.
Retail sales and housing recovered swiftly from the last recession, in 2001, and helped generate jobs that more than replaced the number that manufacturing continued to lose.
But help at the checkout counter and the construction site will be hard to find next year, said Doug Woodward, USC’s economic research director.
“We really believe we’re at a tipping point,” said Woodward, who along with his staff will present an annual forecast for the state’s economy at a conference Monday in Columbia. “There are going to be layoffs in sectors we haven’t seen in a while. It’s spreading from construction into finance.”