It should be a simple question, right? How bad is the credit crunch for small business? Here we are, having just passed a huge national stimulus bill and heard Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's outlines for his economic strategy.
Will the stimulus work? For whom? And what about the new treasury bank plan?
With these questions in mind, please join me in collecting some real information on how small businesses are fairing when they apply for a loan. If you own a small business, take a couple minutes to answer a few short questions here. To understand how this will shed light on the current credit crunch, take a look at these results from my prior survey.
With due respect to some prominent groups and business reporting (which you can get here, for example, from the Wall Street Journal, or here and here from this blog), most of the public voice of small business seems to be either "we want our bailout," "what's in it for us?" or predictable rehash of last Fall's election campaign; taxes, tax breaks, health care rules, and so on. You do see the stimulus debate bogging down into partisan politics, already, right?
As a business owner, with 40 employees and 25 years in business, I don't see a credit crunch as a political football. It's businesses not started, businesses not growing, and businesses failing.
With it all, though, the SBA cut back drastically last year, and the general feeling is that banks, despite the recent bailout, are generally making things harder for business borrowers, not easier. And if that's true, it's not politics, but business; and it's bad news. And yet, I hear from one banker friend that there's a small boom going on (apparently in mortgage refinancing, though, not business loans); and, in the interest of full disclosure, my own business had no trouble signing a new credit line earlier this month. And earlier today I talked to Joel Prakken of Macroeconomic Advisors, who had just released the latest ADP job figures (which are bad, again). Joel says he hears a lot of worry about credit crunch as he talks to businesses around the country, but more worry about rates than worry about not actually having loans approved.
Which serves to highlight the real question: how is small business doing with the banks after the meltdown? Or, if you prefer, after the bailout?
Help answer these questions by taking this survey or sending it to friends who own a small business.So I'm asking small business owners to join me in this poll about the credit crunch. It's following up on what we started a few weeks ago we asked small business owners to share their experiences here with a simple poll on what they're seeing after the meltdown. That was a pretty bleak picture; more so when you combine it with the blog the meltdown feature that preceded it.
In this case the idea is to get specific about the credit crunch. Small business owners: have you applied for business credit? Was it approved, or turned down? Have you not applied because you didn't think you'd have a chance? Let's see if we can get a better picture of what's really going on out there.
Please click here to take this poll.
I pray that the stimulus reaches our disabled.
We live in a world that we are dammed if we do and dammed if you don't.
It seems to me that the banking industry is pushing people to struggle.
This is accomplished by gouging americans with credit card fees.
Visit - http://www.TheCreditCardAct.com
I also made the decision to cut one person from my staff, instead of reducing the hours for everyone else. So, I cut the most junior person, who had a serious attendance and work product problem for about 6 months now. In exchange, each of my part timers picked up 5 more hours per week, and I was able to save a little cash for expenses on top of that. My reward for doing the right thing? He filed a post termination Workers' Compensation claim against me.
so no more natural gas wells will be drilled by him
losing gas rigs fast in Colo, and Utah company had 20 rigs drilling for gas now has 8 that,s just one company heard Canada shut there drilling down 2 months ago from my friend who lives there .
so does that mean were going to have some problems in our energy sector regarding natural Gas
I would think they would want natural gas could be supply is down with so many biz,s shutting down
all I do know is there are a lot of people getting laid off in Utah and Colo industry wide water truck drivers to rig managers and every thing in be tween and yes we have now joined the unemployed
The end customers are obviously have a harder time and making our clients sales more costly. At some point between rising costs of doing business and difficult access to capital, something has to give.
American Express is putting the squeeze on the business, not my clients. AMEX is the nastiest piece of work in the financial industry--have been for the 30+ years I have used plastic. The only reason I got an AMEX card for travel was it was associated with SPG (Starwood Preferred Guests) and the points were valuable to me.
AMEX unilaterally and without prior warning reduced the line of credit on the card last fall--no big deal, since I pay it off in full most months--AND eliminated the service that allowed me to withdraw up to $2000 cash from an ATM in the form of a cash advance, by reducing the cash advance limit to $200. That made the card literally useless to me as a business travel card.
Reason? No reason given. On request, I was told that my spending habits resemble the spending habits of people who default, so even though my personal record on payments was 100%, I would pay for guilt by shopping association.
Hey AMEX, you suck.
go figure
in other words, if they have 700 billion to lend, they would rather lend it to someone who pays ack slowly because then they make interest on that money.
i had my home equity line of credit taken away because i was not using it. same concept.
We need low interest consolidation loans pronto!!!
Where it does affect me, though, is that much of my client base is involved in real estate, tourism, or construction, directly or indirectly - so my volume is down nearly 50%. Since I don't have accumulated debt, I might be able to survive at that rate, but not indefinitely.