Business leaders at Wednesday’s Bellevue Chamber of Commerce Eastside Economic Forecast Breakfast made fairly sunny predictions for future growth as the economy continues to rebound from the 2008 recession.

“I remember five years ago, four years ago, three years ago, America was in decline, China was on the rise,” said Joe Quinlan, chief market strategist for Bank of America.

Now the United States is on the up in the automotive, housing and manufacturing sectors, with energy to play an even larger part in driving the economy in the next several years, Quinlan said. “It’s a game-changer, really,” he said. “It’s a game-changer at home.”Energy costs go down and put more money in the pockets of business leaders, and the energy revolution is being driven by entrepreneurs, state policy and technological innovation.

The United States continues to drive the global economy, Quinlan said, but government is playing a huge part in how efficiently the economy will grow.”I think growth is a terrible thing to waste, as well,” he said. “We’re growing around 2.8 percent. This is when we should be hard at work, rolling up our sleeves and maintain growth we have, make it stronger.”

The setting aside of immigration reform by Congress is a letdown because of the missed opportunity to attract a pool of international talent to the United States for higher education and then retain highly-skilled graduates within its workforce, Quinlan said.”We still have the ability to attract the best and the brightest, but let’s keep them here,” he said. “Let’s entice them to stay. If you look at the Silicon Valley, 40-45 percent of new start-ups are non-U.S. citizens.”

More attention also needs to be spent on fixing damaged international relations in the wake of the National Security Agency’s spying scandal, which Quinlan said is harmful for tech companies like those on the Eastside.

“The Internet is our creation, we gave it to the rest of the world. We ought to run it, but if we start to see a vulcanized, fragmented Internet, that hurts a lot of U.S. companies, many of them in this room today.”

The housing appreciation rate was a large focus for Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries, who presented research showing a slowdown of home value appreciations as potentially beneficial by avoiding reinflating the housing bubble that burst more than five years ago. Bellevue’s home appreciation is currently forecast at 8.6 percent, only slightly higher than in Seattle.

“Homeowners themselves should not like appreciation 15-20 percent year to year because, of course, it’s not sustainable,” said Humphries. “So, what happens is that you see that level of appreciation for many years running, then you’re running toward a housing recession.”

Zillow is predicting interest rates will be at more than 5 percent on a 30-year fixed mortgage by the end of 2014, and negative equity on homes are expected to decline. Bellevue homes with negative equity are at 10.1 percent while Issaquah is at 19 percent and Kirkland at 15.4 percent.

The real estate market in Bellevue has been flooded by Asian investors, said Gary Guenther, senior vice president at Kidder Mathews. Those investors contributed to the $7 billion in national commercial investments recorded this year – double last year’s. Many of those Asian investors, like the ones who purchased the Las Margaritas building in Bellevue for $31 million, are holding on to these properties with plans for redevelopment in the form of mixed-use towers in the future, he said. Many are waiting to see who pulls the trigger first.

“I think that in time these kinds of investors are going to help shape the skyline, particularly in downtown Bellevue,” Guenther said. While tenants in downtown Bellevue are seeking to utilize their office space for recruiting purposes, rental rates will continue to climb. That will be to the benefit of “Class B” landlords not offering high-end office space, Guenther said, as they absorb new tenants forced out of “Class A” offices over cost. Those landlords are also reinvesting in their properties to stay competitive, added Guenther.

All of this growth projected on the Eastside – with a population expected to triple by 2040 – also will depend on corporations and business leaders to maintain their conservation efforts as Puget Sound Energy upgrades its transmission lines to meet future demand, said PSE CEO Kimberly Harris. If companies slip in their conservation goals, demand could rise higher than what PSE is addressing through its upgrades.

“You can see in 2017 we are going to surpass the peak,” she said. “… If we pull back at any point in our conservation, we will hit that demand much faster.”

To download the 2014 Eastside Economic Strategy Guide, go here.

This year’s CEO of the Year award went to developer Kemper Freeman.