Despite emergency stimulus measures, small business lending continues to fall. In the just-ended quarter, the Small Business Administration’s flagship program backed 30% fewer loans than it did a year ago, and 55% fewer loans than it did in 2007, before the recession set in.
The battered U.S. labor market took a step backwards last month as employers trimmed more jobs from their payrolls in June, according to a government report Thursday.
It is one of the touchiest issues in the health care debate: Would a government-run health plan upend the employer-based health insurance system used by 160 million Americans?
In his latest astutely staged gesture as grand economic reformer, President Obama this week directed his Treasury Department to deliver to Congress a 153-page bill creating a new agency to protect unwitting consumers against devious lenders.
President Obama is pouring $13 billion into an ambitious high-speed rail project. Some say it will never make money. Some say it will. And still others say profit is not even the point.
Getting an electronic health record system in place by 2014? Tough.
If ever there were an industry in need of a general, it’s the ethanol industry. Already under siege from food companies blaming biofuels for rising grocery prices, ethanol companies are now seeing their profit margins crushed by falling prices for their product. Compounding the problem, many environmentalists — who five minutes ago seemed to be in ethanol’s corner — have turned against the corn-based fuel.
A new national poll indicates that nearly half of all Americans think the economy has stabilized, but only one in eight believes that a recovery has started.
