By Tara Nurin for NJ Spotlight

New Jersey bankers expect the national and state economies to remain unchanged in the coming year. In the case of the country as whole, that may not be a bad thing, they say. On the local level? Not so much.

“There’s an overwhelming expectation that current conditions in the United States are pretty good and are going to continue into the future,” James Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, told the New Jersey Bankers Association (NJBA) at its annual conference last week. Yet “[t]he state’s economy may be undead but it’s far from achieving a good performance.”

Five-and-a-half years after the end of the recession, Hughes reported that, according to the results of an opinion poll he wrote and gave NJBA members, respondents believe the U.S. economy has settled into a new normal. But New Jersey has experienced less than “full economic liftoff.”

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