Small Business Saves The Economy’s Bacon

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 30, 9:25AM EDT

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There are a host of reasons why small business employment numbers should have been anemic in July. But, they weren’t. As a matter of fact, small business kept overall job growth from moving into the red.

The ADP National Employment Report showed non-farm employment rose by only 9,000 jobs. That is one of the worst showings in several years.

Large businesses, those with over 500 employees, lost 32,000 jobs. Middle sized businesses, those with between 50 and 499 employees lost 9,000 people.

Small businesses, those with less that 50 people, added 50,000 jobs.

The odds against small business pulling all of the load were considerable. In theory, high energy costs and tight credit should be shutting down the ability of companies of modest size to stay open, let alone expand.

Without any direct help from the Fed or the banking system, small businesses must, in many cases, be financing whatever success they have out of their own operating cash flow.

As the economy moves toward the Fall, the open question is whether small business can continue to buck the overall trend. The answer to that is, without some support for credit and commodities price relief, the answer is probably no.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.