4 weakest U.S. states at major risk of local recession: new ranking

President Donald Trump’s trade war is running at full clip, and its effects are starting to show up in the U.S. economy more and more.

Simmering inflation and increasingly weak job numbers have a lot of folks worried that, rather than celebrating the “Golden Age of America”, we may soon be headed for a major recession.

But not all local economies are created equal, and some stand to get hit harder by all the Trump-induced upheaval than others.

Finance site CNBC recently published its America’s Top States for Business Study, which ranked each of the 50 based on how friendly they are to, you guessed it … business.

It also ranked the states in terms of vulnerability to a potential local recession.

The criteria the site used — and some of the states that fell into the bottom 10 — may surprise you.

There may be economic pain on the way for residents of four beat-up states in particular. (Licensed under the Unsplash+ License)

Failing grades for failing states

In order to drum up a score for each state’s economy, CNBC looked at a bunch of areas you’d expect it to: GDP growth, fiscal health, number of corporate headquarters, and a handful of other related metrics.

But it also threw in a Trump-related wrinkle.