Oklahoma coping better than most

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BBC correspondent Matthew Price, who is travelling across the US to see how Americans are coping with the recession, finds that Oklahoma is weathering the economic storm better than most.

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Road-builder Terry Wells says stimulus funding is helping the Oklahoma firm where he works

Della Lovell taught herself to read. She cannot write, can't spell. She didn't ever go to school.

Those were not the 'Good Old Days'. These are the 'Good Old Days' Della Lovell on the Great Depression

"We had to work. We'd starve to death otherwise," she says.

Della was born in 1925 in Oklahoma, just before the Great Depression hit and devastated America.

Now she sits in a wheelchair in a nursing home just outside Oklahoma City. Like many people her age, she doesn't grumble when she speaks of those times.

"My mother would work all day on the boards (cleaning houses) and they'd pay her in scrap meat," for the family.

Della and her sister would go to the woods and chop down trees. Their mother would then turn them into "ties", which were laid under railway tracks.

Ask her to compare the current recession with the Great Depression, and she looks a little bemused. "Those were not the 'Good Old Days'," says Della with a vague smile. "These are the 'Good Old Days'."

Indeed, in Oklahoma the recession has not bitten as hard as it has elsewhere. The unemployment rate here is around 5.5% - less than the national average.

'Like a mama cow'

Still, there are some signs that the economic problems are having an impact.

Business is down 10 to 20% at the cattle market

At the OK Cow Sales cattle market the auctioneer Charlie Brown can barely make himself heard over the groans of the bulls in the pens.

Several calves lie impervious on the ground, asleep.

The US economy is "like a mama cow," he says.

What he means, he goes on to explain, is that it will give birth to new promise, however bad things get here.

The wind blows up from across the plains, as it does here often, and swirls dust around. The trees sway. Rural Oklahoma feels like another world from Wall Street. In some ways it isn't though.

"Cattle market is down I'd say 10 to 20% from its high which was two years ago. It's all about supply and demand," he says.

When people cut back, they spend less on food and prime meat.

Support and scorn for Barack Obama at a cattle auction in Oklahoma

"We'll get used to it," says Charlie, philosophically. "Here in Oklahoma we never did have the boom that they had there on the east coast or the west coast - it never did get that wild."

"We're slowed down," he adds slowly as a fly buzzes past. "This is a laid back area."

Past experience

That helps to explain why Oklahoma is weathering the economic storm better than many places. So too does the fact that it has been through this before.

No. Not in the Great Depression.

In the 1970s, rising oil prices led to a local speculation boom. The state has a lot of oil and natural gas, which is a major part of the economy.

Oklahoma City's Penn Square Bank led that boom, and the bust that followed, when oil prices started to drop in the early 1980s. Dozens of banks collapsed, the local economy was hit especially hard. It took a decade to recover.

The result? Oklahoma learnt from its own personal credit crisis, and decided that "steady as she goes" might be a better way forward.

The city rebuilt its economy. It diversified. It funded public projects not through debt but through, for example, a one cent increase in sales tax. Its banks lent carefully. It did not get involved in some of the creative lending practices that were seen elsewhere.

Growth in this laid back, down to earth state was not exciting, but it was less susceptible to boom and bust.

That, though, has not completely insulated this sleepy state from the recession.

Creating jobs

By the side of route I-35, just south of Oklahoma City, Terry Wells watches as the lorries carrying hot asphalt drive up.

The sweet smell fills the nostrils as they tip the load onto the road's foundation, and Terry's men get to work spreading it out across the road surface.

<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/08/business_enl_1240316425/html/1.stm" onClick="window.open('http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/08/business_enl_1240316425/html/1.stm', '1240316889', 'toolbar=0,scrollbars=0,location=0,statusbar=0,menubar=0,resizable=1,width=466,height=236,left=312,top=100'); return false;"></a>BBC correspondent Matthew Price is travelling across the US, reporting from a new city every day, to assess the state of the economy as President Obama approaches 100 days in office. See the Beyond Wall Street route here.<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/08/business_enl_1240316425/html/1.stm" onClick="window.open('http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/08/business_enl_1240316425/html/1.stm', '1240316889', 'toolbar=0,scrollbars=0,location=0,statusbar=0,menubar=0,resizable=1,width=466,height=236,left=312,top=100'); return false;" >Enlarge Map</a>

Terry works for one of the city's building firms, Haskell Lemon Construction Co.

For several years, he says, the flow of applications from people wanting work was slow, but since December last year "we get 15 or 20 a day, and we haven't seen anything like that in 15 years or more. That tells me there are a lot of people out there looking for jobs."

And this in a state that the experts say is bucking the recession trend.

The good news is that Haskell Lemon is now looking to hire, as a direct result of the billions of dollars that President Obama is pumping into the economy via his stimulus spending plan.

The firm will get $12.5m in new projects. It is taking on at least 15 more workers, and probably more. It has also bought new equipment from other firms.

All this has a multiplier effect for the local and national economy. In turn, multiply this across the country at thousands of other projects, and the hope is to stimulate the nation out of recession.

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