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Inside Indiana Business - Michael Hicks

Despite adding 114,000 new jobs last month, the U.S. economy continues to underperform, says Michael Hicks, director of Ball State's Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER). The Labor Department reported this morning that the nation added 114,000 jobs in September, dropping the unemployment rate to 7.8 percent in September. The department also reported about 86,000 more jobs had been added in July and August than first estimated.

"While a lower unemployment rate is nice, at this rate of creation, the actual number of unemployed will continue to grow," Hicks says. "We need a minimum of 150,000 jobs per month to break even and almost 500,000 per month to get back to full employment."

The Wall Street Journal - Joseph Adinolfi

Generally, many large banks in the U.S. are turning away from small-business loans, preferring instead to issue business credit cards to small-business owners, according to Bob Coleman of Coleman Publishing, a website and weekly newsletter about small-business finance.

Little data exist on the lending practices of nonprofit and for-profit U.S. microlenders, but bankers say the business is expanding. The U.S. microlending marketplace generally is slightly different from that in other countries, where peer lending is more common and where loans can be very tiny, sometimes just hundreds of dollars or less.

The U.S. nonprofit microlenders generally receive funding from private donations and from state and federal programs. Nearly all of them are classified as community development financial institutions and receive block grants ranging from about $1,000 to $1.5 million annually through the U.S. Small Business Administration. The U.S. agency distributed nearly $47.5 million in microloans during its 2011 fiscal year, the largest sum in its 20-year history, through 170 nonprofit lenders.

In the last decade, the SBA microloan program's average loan size has steadily declined from about $14,200 to $11,750, a sign that lenders have continued to supply small-dollar loans, even as credit dried up during the economic downturn. The Business Center for New Americans, Grameen America, and members of the Accion U.S. Network in New York, Chicago and Texas are all partners with the SBA microloan program.