NORWICH – Commerce Chenango held its annual Economic Forecast Breakfast on Tuesday morning at the Canasawacta Country Club, which featured an introduction by NBT Bank President and CEO John H. Watt, Jr. and keynote speaker NBT Bank Director of Wealth Management and Chief Investment Officer Kenneth Entenmann.

Watt provided a brief recap on NBT Bank’s year in review, noting the bank’s assets of $9.1 billion making NBT Bank the 88th largest bank in the country among 5,600 others. Watt also mentioned the bank has 1,800 employees, 500,000 customers, and 183,000 plan participants in its services line of business.

“It was a great year for NBT financially, a very strong bottom line performance at the end of 2017 with $86.6 million in net profit on a recurring basis, and that translated to a new record earnings per share of $1.97 last year, again, on a recurring basis,” said Watt.

Watt introduced keynote speaker Kenneth Entenmann, who presented to attendees an overview of the market and how the tax bill passed at the end of 2017 has affected and will affect business going forward.

“Last year we talked about ‘Trump-o-nomics’ and its three pillars: we were going to get tax reform, we were going to get regulatory reform, and we were going to get an infrastructure bill,” said Entenmann. “It took a little bit longer than everyone had hoped last year, but we’re two-for-three. We’ve gotten tax reform, we’ve gotten probably the most progress we’ve made on regulatory reform, and as a bank, we feel that in a big way.”

Entenmann continued to say that at last year’s Economic Forecast Breakfast, he shared with attendees that the United States corporate income tax was uncompetitive at 39 percent compared to a worldwide average of 28 percent. He said as a result, politicians were getting upset that companies were inverting and moving headquarters to other countries.

“We were uncompetitive. But now, that 39 [percent] is 21 [percent]. And that’s pretty powerful,” said Entenmann.