The U.S. economy has been growing for quite some time and has even been producing jobs. Unfortunately, that job growth has been consistently inconsistent and the word you hear most often on the lips of economists describing the recovery is ‘uneven.’ The Conference Board’s Index of Leading Economic Indicators fell in April 2011, one of [...]

If you look carefully at President Obama’s most strenuous efforts at small business outreach, you might start to see a pattern emerge. Take a look at “Startup America,” the administration’s effort to encourage and support what it calls “high impact” small businesses. The SBA has already lined up a mentor matching program for those entrepreneurs [...]

According to the latest release on the subject from the Commerce Department, fourth quarter 2010 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth clocked in at 3.2%, following a third quarter that saw an increase of 2.6% in the GDP. All in all, that is a pretty respectable level of economic growth. The jobs picture is the classic [...]

Last week, the Labor Department released its quarterly Business Employment Dynamics data for the second quarter of last year. During that quarter, gross job gains from opening and expanding businesses totaled 6.9 million, while gross job losses from closing or contracting businesses totaled 6.2 million. For the quarter, we saw a net job gain of [...]

It has been about five months since we’ve had a chance to take a look at the economy. Our last foray into economic crystal ball gazing being a conversation with economist Anne Wenzel for Microbusiness Conversations on Blog Talk Radio. (You can listen to the archive of that show here.) At the time, quite a [...]

A couple of weeks ago, when we looked at how the economy was doing, we saw signs of recovery that did not seem to have penetrated to the level of the small business economy. That state of being persists, according to a new set of numbers released over the last couple of weeks by almost [...]

Last week’s Labor Department report that the economy added 162,000 jobs last month has prompted a certain amount of political happy dancing, justified or not. Even accounting for the 42,000 temporary workers hired by the Census Bureau and the labor market action that can be considered as delayed from February, the news is still some [...]

Last week, the SBA Office of Advocacy released the latest in its series of Quarterly Indicators briefs, this time reporting on the fourth quarter of 2009. So, now, I get to throw a bunch of numbers at you, the good news being that there will not be a quiz when I’m done. The Commerce Department [...]

When the financial markets collapsed and small business lending froze, one set of heroes of the day was the nation’s microlenders. In response, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included enough money to support $50 million in microloans, an unprecedented infusion of funding for the federal government. Unfortunately, microfinance organizations recently seem to be facing [...]

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, [...]