Even though there wasn’t much in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) that was specifically useful for microbusinesses, that is not meant to imply that the Obama Administration ignored small businesses completely. In fact, the ARRA included a fairly significant to-do list for the U.S. Small Business Administration, most of which was focused on [...]

Nobody is doing the happy dance exactly but there are some rather more cheerful noises coming from hither and yon with respect to economic prospects in the near term. Economy watchers don’t expect a return to truly robust growth but, after what the U.S. economy endured during 2009, any sort of growth is welcome. So, [...]

Sixty-four percent of small business owners report decreased revenue over the last 12 months, according to a survey released last week by the National Small Business Association. On the other hand, a majority of survey respondents (52%) expect the economy to produce growth opportunities over the next 12 months. And here’s more good news: the [...]

We all know that it is not rational to expect the economy to go straight from ‘ew’ to awe in less than a month. And, while it might make sense to assume that things will be better in December 2010 than they were in January 2010, it will still take some time to get there.

So, while you are listening to various folks with various sorts of axes to grind, bear in mind that things are neither uniformly wonderful nor frighteningly terrible. It isn’t necessary to find deep meaning or predictive value in any particular set of tea-leaf substitutes.

Right now, it is what it is.

In some ways, it’s probably a good thing that the government doesn’t seem to have noticed any of this yet. If they had, they would almost certainly have decided to regulate it in some way, under the mistaken notion that all those poor freelancers need to be protected … whether they want to be protected or not.

At the same time, this new labor market movement could use some support — especially in this economy.

Last week, the Obama Administration took the time to wish us all a belated Happy New Year, in the form of a week-long look back at what they were doing all year last year. This sort of political self-indulgence is not uncommon, of course, although it usually emanates from Capitol Hill. On the other hand, [...]

One of the most stark differences between the outgoing Bush Administration and the incoming Obama Administration was undoubtedly their respective policies toward domestic microfinance. After spending several years trying to get rid of the SBA’s Microloan program by zeroing out its funding, Bush finally resigned himself to the inevitable but continued to look for something [...]

Part of the reason why they don’t know what to do is because the economy is not behaving the way it used to and nobody has appeared before them to explain how it is behaving now because nobody really knows.

Besides the incentives provided by campaign donations, lawmakers like to tinker with big companies at times like this because the big companies haven’t changed. They remain familiar and the lawmakers understand them.

The things they are doing for small businesses are only helping a small number of them because only a small number of them are still doing business in 20th century ways. They don’t know how we operate anymore and there aren’t enough of them who do their own tweeting for us to explain it to them.

It was almost a year ago that The MicroEnterprise Journal was covering the how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was taking shape even before Barack Obama had been sworn into office. And what I was saying at the time was that there was not much in it that would directly benefit microbusinesses. Fast forward [...]

It’s the start of a new year and everybody in the small business community seemed infused with a new sense of optimism. But that faith in economic good things to come took something of a hit when we learned that the economy lost another 68,000 jobs in December. Of course, some where less surprised by [...]