Last week the House Committee on Small Business convened a hearing to re- examine the challenges facing small businesses looking for debt capital and banks looking for credit-worthy small business borrowers. The questions of the day were only what was expected: what is the status of the small business financing market and what can Congress [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

If you wanted to support a business in your community through a severe economic downturn, there are only two ways you could do that directly. You would have to either give the business owner money to invest in his business (equity capital) or you would have to buy things from that business. Most people are [...]

Those forms on Everything-You-Could-Possibly-Imagine.gov all say that somebody reads each and every submission but we have no way of knowing, really.

And even if they do, the odds of those emails being read by somebody who matters, somebody who is in a position to evaluate a new idea on the merits and maybe take it to the President and say, “Excuse me, sir, but here’s something that I don’t believe we’ve considered … ”

… those odds are very slim. Let’s face it: all the evidence suggests that they don’t really want to know what we think. We all know that, even though they would be much happier if we pretended we didn’t.

It seems pretty clear that the Obama Administration wants businesses to start hiring again and that they want that to happen really badly. The President has been doing a certain amount of campaigning to let citizens know what he’s been doing to deal with an unemployment rates that is stubbornly hovering at around 10%. It’s [...]

Meanwhile, everywhere else you look — whether it is at social safety nets or whether it is at a National Broadband Plan or whether it is at the push to increase U.S. exports — there appears to be no place in Obamaland for the sturdy American microbusiness.

In many ways, that really doesn’t matter.

Microbusinesses have managed to grow in number and increasing importance in the U.S. economy without a shred of support from the federal government and I would imagine they will continue to do so.

On the other hand, I’ll confess I’m disappointed.

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 [...]