Discover Claims Slight Uptick In Small Biz Confidence

As usual, it’ll probably be quite a while before anyone can say for sure whether the economy took a turn for the worse or better this month.  But the latest Discover Small Business Watch report at least created the possibility that conditions improved.

Don’t look for any claims that things got better by leaps and bounds.  The report, which was based on a random survey of 750 small business owners, just indicated that the index of confidence among owners increased from 73.0 in August to 73.8 in September.

Still, that’s more optimistic than the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index numbers we covered yesterday.

The improvement was "driven in part by fewer small business owners reporting cash flow issues than they did in August," according to an official statement from Discover.  "Forty-six percent of small business owners report having cash flow issues this month, down from 53 percent in August . . ."

Then another bright spot was that 71 percent of small business owners said they don’t need a loan.

Let’s hope a bigger increase in these numbers is evident next month.  In the meantime, we can at least report that the Dow and Nasdaq aren’t crashing today.