Today, President Barack Obama is formally unveiling a spate of initiatives to improve hiring at and bolster lending to small businesses, pushing again for a priority first announced last winter.
The centerpiece is the new $30 billion Small Business Lending Fund, which will offer funding to small community banks. (It More…
Today, the Congressional Oversight Panel — the independent watchdog that oversees the Obama administration’s Troubled Asset Relief Program — issued a report slamming TARP’s progress in aiding small businesses. The report notes that despite the administration’s efforts to encourage banks to lend to small businesses, “it is not clear More…
This morning, President Barack Obama addressed today’s positive jobs report and indicated that while the recovery is real, it remains fragile. In the statement, he addressed two weaknesses in the employment picture: small businesses, for whom credit remains frozen and which have not picked up hiring, and More…
The National Federation of Independent Business — the small-business lobbying organization — reports that small-business optimism declined in February. Small businesses reported smaller workforces and continued price cutting, among other sluggish stats. This chart encapsulates the continued bad times:
After President Obama called the heads of 12 of the largest banks into his office to lecture them about not lending enough to small businesses, the message was clear: It’s time to get to lending, or the government will get to regulating. So while banks are More…
President Obama announced his $150 billion job creation initiative on Tuesday, which includes everything from new spending for highway and bridge construction, to small business tax cuts, to retrofitting millions of homes to make them more energy-efficient. It’s the sort of news that probably would have gotten More…
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