Data is fairly intractable stuff. You can learn quite a lot from it but, in the end, it only tells you as much as it tells you. That means that a given data set can raise dozens of new questions even as it answers the first dozen questions the researcher asked. Case in point: the [...]

What happens to small business lending when the banks collectively go into a spasm and traditional financing routes dry up? With the exception of the Microloan program, almost all the lending in the SBA’s stable of capital access programs is done by banks. In an economic situation in which small businesses can’t get loans, not [...]

The small business natives are getting restless. After almost two years of patiently waiting, the nation’s small businesses had their reward (in a manner of speaking) when they become a central focus in the campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama for the world’s most over-rated job. Thanks to the fortuitous appearance of Joe the [...]

It’s a well-established fact that the number of nonemployer businesses increases when the economy tanks. We won’t have the numbers for a couple of years yet but, when we look back on 2008, I have no doubt at all that we’ll see another large spike in self-employment.

And yet, there’s little evidence that the policy movers and shakes either know or care about all those single-person businesses, even as they consider how best to respond to this newly-declared recession.

That’s a problem.

While there is a certain amount of hyperventilating among microbusiness advocates because millions of them may be subject to ruinous mortgage payment resets in the near future, most microbusiness owners have other problems in connection with the current state of the economy. That was the principle finding of yet another member survey, entitled “Housing and [...]

Now that President-elect Obama has added a bit more in the way of detail to his public pronouncements about his economic plan, we learn that he hopes to embark on the largest series of public works projects since FDR. Repairs to highways and bridges, renovations to schools, access to electronic medical records for hospitals and [...]

Over the past few months, while a horrified nation watched the financial markets implode before their unbelieving eyes, the microenterprise development industry has been engaged in a certain amount of throat-clearing and hand-waving. The Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO), the national trade organization for the industry, has repeatedly (if a bit diffidently) pointed out that [...]

What’s going to have to happen before our nation’s leaders make the connection between jobs and microbusinesses?

Well, more than one connection, really.

There’s the easy stuff, the screamingly obvious connection between microbusiness employers and the millions of jobs they create. But there’s also the nonemployers — and that’s a subject that requires enough real thought to be daunting for the average public servant.

If you were able to cull all the standard advice in order to design the perfect online microbusiness retail outfit, it would look something like this: First, find a market niche. Then offer your niche a set of products that are difficult to find, at prices that most will be able to afford (even if [...]

New research released by the National Association for the Self-Employed last week found that approximately 3.8 million microbusiness owners hold an estimated 93% of so-called “toxic mortgages” that put them in immediate danger of foreclosure and homeless in the near future. Not only that, but mortgage brokers evidently deliberately targeted prime or near-prime microbusiness borrowers [...]