Entries from BizBox Blog on Slate tagged with 'the economy'
Sales Down, Profits Up
Another day, another set of bad numbers for the nation's small businesses. In the past fiscal year (October to October), sales at small businesses--defined, fairly reasonably, as private companies with annual revenues of under $10 million--saw sales drop almost 4%....
Women in the Workforce (and the Start-up Scene?)
What happens when a recession produces massive layoffs, and 78% of those laid off are men? You have, as the New York Times reports in an excellent article, an influx of women entering--or, in most cases, re-entering--the workforce. This has...
Wake Up: Recovery's on the Way
The economy is beginning to get to the point where hunkering down and merely trying to survive is not only no longer necessary--it might actually be a bad business move. That's because, as Entrepreneur's Daily Dose is only the latest...
Ladies and Gentlement, It's Generation Y!
The Entrepreneurial Mind's Jeff Cornwall notices an interesting dynamic in American Express OPEN's latest small business survey (OPEN is our sponsor, by the way). Namely, Gen-Y entrepreneurs--so current young people--seem more likely to hire, make capital investments, and in general...
Anonymous Banker Takes On Congress and the Banks
It's been almost one year since I wrote to the New York Times's Joe Nocera and predicted that the Worst Is Yet To Come, and specifically pointed to the economic risks posed by the credit card industry. I'm saddened to...
Comparing Types of Cos.
Over at You're The Boss, they crunch the numbers and find something interesting: over the past year and a half, as far as small businesses (under 50 employees) on non-farm private payrolls are concerned, those companies producing goods took a...
This One's Optimistic
What does the National Federation of Independent Business have to say about the state of small business owners' optimism as August closed? The group's celebrated monthly report shows a rise, even as jobs continue to decline. So, some slight good...
The Stimulus, Half a Year Later
It's been over half a year since the $770 billion federal stimulus package--official name: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act--was signed into law. Has it helped small businesses? While there's no way to ascertain the counterfactual (how things would be...
Give Us Some Credit
John Tozzi takes a gander at the Federal Reserve's latest lending statistics (download here). His conclusion is that, as far as bank lending to small businesses goes, things are slightly better...maybe: "The survey shows that we may be approaching a...
Bad News On The Spending Front
A few days ago, we noted that one-third of U.S. small business owners name slow consumer spending as their top business concern. Well here come the statistics to bear that out: despite the remarkable success of the famed "cash for...
Feelin' Good
We've been awfully dour over the past several days of blogging--consumer spending problems; CIT circling the drain; health insurers' "purging"--and even our post earlier today on being "grateful" is really more of a bittersweet sort of thing. So let's end...
Spending Tops The Problem List
Looking at the results of the National Federation of Independent Business's July small-business optimism survey, Fortune Small Business concludes that the biggest problem affecting small businesses right now is spending: specifically, the lack of it. One-third of those surveyed said...
Discounting Is In "Vogue"
Not that we needed it, but here is further confirmation of what we've been saying--namely, that the basic solution to surviving hard times is discounting, discounting, and more discounting. The New York Times reports that Vogue, the Condé Nast monthly...
Do Small Businesses Create Jobs?
In the course of a column about employer health-insurance mandates--we promise, we will refer to this in a future post--the WaPo's business columnist Steve Pearlstein refers to the notion that small businesses are responsible for the majority of job growth...
Where Are We Going?
Or, as the Romans would've said, "Quo vadimus?" As unmistakable signs of the beginnings of nascent economic turnaround begin to pop up, it's the question many small business owners are asking themselves: what's next? When are things going to get...
Tending to the Green Shoots
"Green shoots" is the buzz phrase of this week: the idea being that we are finally beginning to see some new growth (maybe it's all the rain!) among the economic wreckage of the past several months. The stock market is...
Greed Used To Be Good
The headline is from the memorable speech made by Gordon Gekko (right), as played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone's 1987 classic, Wall Street, a role for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1988. "In...
Be Cheap or Be Unique (or Go Home)
Two different articles today illustrate which types of businesses--retailers especially--are managing to do alright for themselves even in one of the worst consumer spending climates of modern times. Essentially, the two main types of thriving companies are the known discounters...
A Quick Note on Stimulus and Small Business
Small businesses and the small business blogosphere have tended to view the Obama administration's $787 billion stimulus package from the perspective of how it is likely to throw extra federal contracts small businesses' way. Certainly we've covered the stimulus in...
Taking A Pay Cut To Survive
In light of yesterday's post on taxes, in which we discussed a small business owner who reports both wages from their own business as well as their business's corporate profits on their personal income tax return, it's worth noting a...
The Credit Crunch As Red Herring
This morning's New York Times brings a helpful new way to look at the broader problems affecting small businesses--one that bears out what we've been saying. What've we been saying? That the credit crunch is something of a red herring--real,...
How I Got Hit By The Great Recession
As we struggle to understand the-economic-situation-which-has-yet-to-be-named (I like Peggy Noonan’s “Great Recession” moniker as well as any name so far, so I’m going to use it below), I’ve decided to offer up anecdotes from my own small business to...
Dispatches from the Recession's Front Lines
The New York Times has been following a bunch of area small-business owners since last October as they attempt to cope with the recession. They've recently published an update on three: an historic Queens bike manufacturer, a Financial District Middle...
Is The American Dream Still Alive?
Last week I wrote about the optimistic optimism index, the new Small Business Success Index. The SBSI indicated that small businesses are succeeding despite the economic downturn. But for the country as a whole, there’s a slightly different view....
Beat The Recession
Last week, we wondered whether the word "recession-proof" weren't practically non-existent. Today we'll try to be cheerier, with a look at some companies that actually are doing alright for themselves during these down times--and how you can emulate their success....
Is There Such A Thing As "Recession-Proof"?
A few recent posts on how the struggling auto industry is affecting small businesses formed the sort of juxtaposition that positively screams, "Blog about this!" So here we go. On the one hand, the potential collapse of the Big...
Four Rules To Follow During This Economy
In a recent post, "Persistence and Experience Pay Off", I cited a research study at The Harvard Business School indicating that entrepreneurs with a history of success are much more likely to succeed in new ventures than first-timers or...
How Small Businesses Could Turn The Midwest Around
When the prospect of bailing out the Big Three was being debated late last year, we joined the discussion, because, as we noted, the livelihoods of thousands and thousands of small businesses, across the country and especially in the...
Is the Stimulus Grounds For Economic Optimism?
Introducing the National Federation of Independent Business's last pre-stimulus (and pre-Obama) optimism index. Last month, we reported that December's index--which takes the results of the NFIB's broader monthly survey and spits out a single figure that purports to measure entrepreneurs'...
A Good Reminder For Today
On a day when we learned that the U.S. shed nearly 600,000 jobs last month, and now has an unemployment rate of 7.6%: a beautiful, sobering article from the Wall Street Journal that reminds us who it is who is...
The Job Losses Mount
ADP's monthly job survey just came out, and the picture, needless to say, isn't pretty. (Full report here.) The top number is 522,000: the number of non-farm jobs lost between December and January. However, the vast brunt of these...
Dismal Small Business Employment Numbers
We always hear about how small businesses are the engine of, yes, national economic growth, but especially of national job creation. In other words, small businesses take up a disproportionate share--more than their sizes would suggest--of U.S. employment and employment...
Six Entrepreneurs Tell Us How It's Going
We were there in October when the New York Times announced it would be following six New York-area small business owners over the next several months as they attempt to cope with the credit crunch and what we now know...
No Auto Bailout. Uh-oh.
Well, looks like the bailout of the Big Three isn't going to come through, at least for now. Though a bill that would have provided $14 billion in loans was backed by everyone from Congressional Democrats to President George...
Good News on the Hiring Front?
Sounds hard to believe. Last week, after the broader, much-publicized announcement that U.S. private companies got rid of a whopping 250,000 jobs in November alone, we reported on the fact that 79,000 of those came from small businesses. That...
79,000 Small Biz Layoffs. In November.
If you've been reading the news, you've probably noted the announcement that 250,000 jobs were eliminated in the U.S. private sector in November alone (although, since in the same report the payroll company ADP revised its prior October number...
The Bailout Passes Small Businesses Over
So last week came news of the Federal Reserve's ambitious new lending program. $500 billion to buy mortgage-backed securities. $100 billion to buy the debt of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and others in the mortgage underwriting business. Plus, and...
Is Now The Time To Buy? (Or To Sell?)
A point we have frequently tried to make when discussing the effect that the current recession is likely to have on the economy, and on the small business landscape in particular, is that there are a few companies that,...
How To Cope With Poor Holiday Sales
The new projection is that holiday sales will grow 2.2% this year. Growth! you think. In a contracting economy--this is good news! Think again. Retailers depend on the yearly holiday season the way workers depend on that paycheck every...
An Argument For Optimism
It's hard not to look at the current economic crisis as an opportunity to cringe and to fear, particularly if you're a small business owner. And, if the National Federation of Independent Business's monthly optimism index is to be...
Ask and Ye Shall Receive
In a recent post about federal procurement problems--related to the mess in which nearly $5 billion in reported small business contracts last year actually went to some of the world's largest corporations--the owner of La Grange, Mo.-based Mark Twain...
The Optimism Index Continues Its Plummet
Another month, another small business optimism survey courtesy the National Federation of Independent Business. The October survey (covering September) showed fairly dismal numbers yet also, for the most part, ones that were on their way up. Not so the...
No News Is Bad News
The Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy has released its report for the third quarter of 2008. It contains little news that is new and just as much that is good. We know that the economy contracted .3% in...
Big Banker Sez: Time To Help The Small Banks
A few days ago, the New York Times's Joe Nocera reported on big banks' plans to take the billions in government money they are getting from the $700 billion bailout package and use it not to increase loans and...
Against Spending Cuts
It seems natural, during a bad time (and this is a bad time: we can frankly start dusting off the r-word), to cut costs. What could be more obvious? And while it might be nice to cut costs in...
Small Business Owners Are Not Optimistic, Don't Like The Bailout
Credit card company Discover has released the results of its monthly small business owner survey, and the outlook--and these entrepreneurs' outlook--isn't brilliant. (Time to note that BizBox's sponsor is also a credit card company, American Express OPEN.) The survey's...
Across The Ocean, Similar Small Business Concerns
In Great Britain--"a nation of shopkeepers"--they hold small business owners, whose companies overall generate over half of the nation's gross domestic product, in special esteem. Now, the New York Times reports, these men and women are angry because the...
A Scam of a Bailout Plan
For the record, we were in favor of the bailout, even though some in the small business community were skeptical. Even though it appeared to contain little specifically geared towards small businesses, it did contain some provisions that appeared...
Be Careful What 7(a) Help You Wish For
Earlier this week, as we discussed yesterday, the Small Business Administration publicly urged banks to, in effect, go easy on small business borrowers who had taken out 7(a) loans, which are partly backed by the SBA, given the current...
The SBA Makes A Polite Suggestion
Sharon McLoone at our washingtonpost.com sister site reports that the Small Business Administration is urging banks who are qualified lenders of so-called 7(a) loans--the basic SBA program, under which loans to qualified small businesses who apply under the strictures...
The Times Follows Six Small Businesses
We have to admit, as small-business-news junkies, we're a bit excited. The New York Times has decided that how the recession, the credit crisis, and the rest affects small businesses is news fit to print, and will be following...
Why Community Banks Feel Left Out
Several months ago--before the latest round of federal government rescues--our own Michael Taylor asked, "Where's My Bailout??" Writing in the wake of the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac actions, Michael said, "as a small business owner, I...
Your Payroll Account is Now Fully Insured
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the New Deal-created entity whose mandate is to insure all U.S. bank accounts up to a given amount in the case of bank failures, has been one of the brightest spots in terms of...
The Credit Collapse's Cause: Hiding in Plain Sight
What’s causing the credit crunch? Blame the Woozle! My three year-old daughter knows that when Pooh and Piglet go searching for the Heffalump, or, on another occasion, the Woozle, they--Pooh and Piglet --are so confused about the causes of...
Bear Market in Optimism
The National Federation of Independent Business has released the results of its monthly Small Business Optimism survey for September and--surprise!--the group's confidence index remains "recession level". More dishearteningly, fully half of the survey data was taken before Lehman Brothers's...
Rent, Don't Sell: Lessons For The New Economy
Via Independent Street, financial services industry researcher Sageworks has done a study on which industries' small businesses have been hit hardest by the recent economic downturn, and which industries' small businesses are best set to ride out the current...
Schumer Sez: Loan To Small Businesses!
We actually were waiting to post on this until we heard back from Sen. Chuck Schumer's office, which we called yesterday, but it's been a day and we haven't yet, so you should be aware that Schumer held a...
A Few Model Companies For The Credit Crunch
It is worth taking an extended look at a new Forbes piece that showcases several companies who appear not to have a need to face the current credit crisis with too worrisome a countenance--who, in the magazine's words, "appear...
The Bailout's Been Passed...What's Next?
Well, for one thing, a healthy dose of skepticism is what's next. Will it work--will we see a sufficient loosening of the credit markets? Many aren't so sure. The Washington Post points out that where some have seen cause...
MSNBC On Small Businesses in the Current Economy
A lot of you out there are not feeling overly optimistic right now (it's admittedly hard to blame you). According to Discover, 51% of small business owners said their business's conditions were getting worse; Silicon Valley and its attendant...
Cash Is King: Why, Right Now, Small Is Better
Note: see BizBox's previous post for a discussion of whether the economy's dire straits are a particular advantage or disadvantage for small businesses. The financial headlines this week threaten to turn small business owners into Chicken Littles. In fairness,...
Small Businesses: Boarding Up For the Storm
The National Federation of Independent Business has released its July survey for small business confidence and it's, er, not good. Recession-level, actually. Some specific findings: -Investments Barely one-fifth of those surveyed said they planned to make capital expenditures over...
Feed Subscription
If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to a feed of all future entries tagged 'the economy'. [What is this?]
