Lots of new regulations whose interpretation by the bureaucracies is still unknown.
Effect
There is fear among those who hire. Click on it for a better image and dig what happens to the light grey line, fear of regulations under Obama.H/T: Mish's link to the November NFIB Small Business Trends Report. Mish is emphasizing that inflation is not a threat in his post, hence the highlighting of that aspect of the chart. Not shown in this chart is sales, which Mish shows in another chart at that link. Sales is still the #1 issue for small business, but regulations are no small part of their concerns.
Print all the money you want, it will have very little effect on what is keeping small businesses from expanding and hiring.
Taxes and regulations are a big concern, but sales is obviously the biggie. Who cares what tax breaks you get, or what regulations get repealed, if you can't sell what you make?
ReplyDeleteWho's the customer to buy it? For the people I work with in the mining industry, it's China. The people who sell things that China wants to buy are doing OK as far as I can see.
Yeah, sales was number one with a bullet. My point here was that the Fed's action of printing $600B is just driving everyone outside the US around the bend in exchange for solving nothing of importance.
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