How Bad is Business in Chicago?

Pretty bad:

• John Deere, one of the Fortune 500 companies that still calls Illinois home, has been making capital expenditure decisions that Wirepoints founder Mark Glennon and Dan Proft described Monday morning as a slow-motion divestiture the state’s political class and business press have either missed or chosen to ignore. A new excavator factory is being built in Kernersville, North Carolina, and a one-point-two-million-square-foot distribution center with one hundred and fifty permanent jobs and four hundred to five hundred union construction positions is going up outside Hebron, Indiana. Proft said he was told by a reliable source in the industrial property sector that John Deere had been ready to green-light a Chicago location for that distribution center before taking a hard look at the lawlessness in and around the city and choosing Indiana instead. Glennon confirmed the pattern, noting that companies that pass up Illinois rarely say so publicly to avoid burning bridges, but the capital investment decisions tell the story clearly enough without any comment.

And not to put too fine a point on it:

• A text from a Chicago crane operator during the segment put a fine point on it: there are currently six standing permitted tower cranes in the city with only three more on the books for all of 2026.

Tower cranes are usually a pretty good indicator of economic growth - if you see a bunch of them operating then the building trades are active along with all the supporting businesses that go along with it. The fact that there are only six cranes active and only three permits pending means that there isn't any major construction going on which indicates a stagnant or shrinking tax base.

John Deere quietly moving operations elsewhere is another red flag.