Rarely do I get to see such an honest account of small business conditions. This report is startling, never in our life times have conditions been so hostile to small business.
I took the liberty of breaking a few of the charts out of this report for you. Let’s start with Sales, Expected versus Actual. Here you will find that expected sales jumped tremendously since the beginning of the year, almost like you would guess they are by listening to CNBS, but just look at how different reality turned out. Now look over at the left scale at that reality figure! That’s right, it says down almost 40%. My critique here is that we don’t get to see the raw data and so we don’t know what the baseline is. Still, there have obviously been many months in a row of decline without a like recovery:
Next is Small Business Earnings, again take a look at the percentage declines:
And this is the table form of presenting their earnings data, 2009 is at the bottom:
Note that Increased Costs is not as big a problem as it was two years ago, now Sales Volume is the problem, which reflects a debt saturated consumer who is 70% of the economy:
The next chart shows Credit Conditions via loan availability – DOWN:
All in all, a fairly bleak report. I would like to see them report some raw numbers, but otherwise it seems relatively honest and worth a good look-over (ht idoc)…
