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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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.

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 [...]

All things considered, reaction to the news that the economy grew 3.5% during the third quarter of this year was greeted with relatively little fanfare. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the sudden spike in gross domestic product is the fact that it primarily reflects a sizable increase in personal consumption, which is explained, in [...]

Small businesses will need to sell to the federal government because the federal government buys more of everything than everybody. In order to expand their capacity to sell to the federal government, small businesses need to borrow money.

Then they’ll create a mess of jobs, which will get all those unemployed people off our backs. And you wonder why we love small businesses!

But will they? The prediction that this will be another jobless recovery is still with us and, if that’s the case, then policy makers seem to be barking up a whole forest full of the wrong tree.

At the risk of upsetting some people terribly, it sometimes seems difficult to tell one politician from another. It would be difficult to imagine two members of that calling who could be more different from each other than George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama. But President Bush, touting the efficacy of his economic policies [...]