How much do downturns really matter to small businesses? During the 2001-2003 recession, the number of microbusinesses increased by an impressive 8.7%, climbing from 21.1 million to 22.9 million. The number of employer firms increased by 3% over the period and employment at those firms grew by 2.5% during the recession years. According to these [...]

It is always interesting to see how much time and energy (not to mention money) members of Congress will expend on a tiny minority of firms, large or small. At a time when capital markets remain more or less frozen and it is probably worth looking at every source of capital that may be available [...]

Earlier this month, the SBA Office of Advocacy released the latest in its regular series of quarterly small business indicators, covering the fourth quarter of 2008, and it was an attractive report if you happen to be fond of the color red. There was relatively little good news to be teased out of all the [...]

President Obama’s stimulus package, or a reasonable facsimile that may or may not bear much resemblance to it in its original form, is wending its way through Congress right now. The House passed its version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act late last month. The Senate version, which is expected to be ready for [...]

Walking into a new year, you probably don’t need me to tell you that the economy seems to be a mess. The third quarter of 2008 market the initial contraction in GDP for this recession but something tells me it won’t be the last. Consumer confidence is down again and small and microbusiness owners are [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last week, the Commerce Department announced that the economy contracted a bit more than originally estimated during the third quarter of this year. Naturally, that has made a lot of people very nervous. Right now, all eyes are on the 2008 holiday shopping season as the closest thing to real-time economic indicators as we are [...]

President-elect Barack Obama told his radio audience during the Democrats’ weekly address this weekend that he and his economic team would act boldly to deal with an economy that was generating more bad news every week. He promised to inject new life into the economy by investing in infrastructure projects and building a new alternative [...]

“The U.S. economy experienced weaknesses in the third quarter, as real gross domestic product fell 0.3 percent.” Thus begins the SBA Office of Advocacy’s quarterly economic report, didactically entitled Third Quarter 2008: The Economy and Small Business. This was not among the most aesthetically pleasing of these reports; the red ink flowed liberally with news [...]