With everybody in Washington seemingly in hysterics about the antics of the financial markets, it’s pretty easy to forget that fixing that probably won’t fix what ails the real economy. What ails the real economy is fairly simple (although it is possible to complicate the explanation in any number of ways). Consumers are tapped out. [...]

Isn’t it odd that huge companies like GM and American Airlines and AIG, with access to more resources than you and I could ever dream of, are deemed deserving of help when they get into trouble (usually brought about by a combination of greed and poor management decisions), while you and I and our microbusinesses are not supposed to need anything at all?

Evidently, companies — well, no … large companies — are judged by a different standard.

Lack of financial resources and lack of business planning are the primary start up challenges for microbusinesses in rural Nebraska, according to a recently released needs assessment report by the Rural Enterprise Assistance Project (REAP), a project of the Center for Rural Affairs. Access to capital, cash flow and working capital were identified by established [...]

Since it’s going to be October before the week is out, it should come as no surprise that retail industry types are starting to talk about those all-important fourth quarter sales and, specifically, about the upcoming holiday shopping season. And, since most of the economic news seems pretty dismal these days, you might expect early [...]

I suspect we’d find, if we looked at it carefully, that most routine medical care does not need to be financed. By pretending that it does, we simply add to the cost and make medical care less affordable that it really is.

The only reason nobody seems to have figured that out yet is that nobody seems to have considered the notion that the way things are is not necessarily the way they have to be.

In case you didn’t know it, if you accept credit card payments, you need to be in compliance with the data security standards developed by the PCI Security Standards Council. That’s true whether you are a point-of-service merchant who swipes your customers’ credit cards or whether you are an online microbusiness merchant who never sees [...]

In spite of all the talk we’ve been hearing about “change” during this campaign, neither presidential candidate offers much that is strikingly new in the way of health insurance proposals. Basically, Republican candidate John McCain wants to bring down health insurance costs by using the free market to increase competition. Democratic candidate Barack Obama wants [...]

Just in case anybody was thinking that last week’s Wall Street gyrations have nothing to do with privately held, unincorporated small businesses, the National Small Business Association’s Mid-Year Economic Report puts the kibosh on such comfortable ideas. Small business owners have a pretty dismal view of the economy, with 79% of them anticipating flat growth [...]

A Senate Small Business Committee hearing last week explored the ongoing challenges faced by women and minorities, and small business owners from distressed urban and rural communities, when it comes to access to capital. The picture portrayed through witness testimony was pretty grim. It was also hauntingly familiar. We learn that collateral and net worth [...]

The Senate Small Business Committee also held a roundtable last week to examine the challenges and opportunities facing women buisness owners 20 years after the federal government formalized its support for them with the Women’s Business Ownership Act, signed in 1988. Women owned businesses have come pretty far in the last 20 years but they [...]