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 [...]

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.

If small businesses can’t borrow money, they won’t be able to deal with cash flow issues or meet payroll or more forward with expansion plans (yes, Virginia, firm expansions do happen during recessions).

Without all that, they won’t be able to create jobs and lead us out of this recession.

The only problem with that prognosis is that small businesses are already leading us out of this recession. Nobody seems to have noticed because the businesses involved are very small and don’t move in the same circles as Vern Buchanan.

They are microbusinesses.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Maybe those big companies just need to be allowed to die.

A lot of people in Washington seem to find that a terrifying prospect. More terrifying, evidently, than being trillions of dollars in debt.

It didn’t have to be this way, if the policy makers had been willing to put their money where their months have been for years.