- Kent Hoover
- Washington Bureau Chief
The question is whether the SBA will have a new administrator by then. President Barack Obama announced plans two weeks ago to nominate Maria Contreras-Sweet, a community banker from Los Angeles, for the post. The announcement came 11 months after former SBA Administrator Karen Mills announced her plans to leave the agency.
Mills stayed around until August, and then Hulit, who had been in charge of the agency's lending programs, took over as acting administrator. As Obama acknowledged in his announcement of Contreras-Sweet's nomination, Hulit stayed at the SBA longer than she originally intended.
Read full article here from The Business Journals
Unfortunately, the SBA has abandoned small business, and is now more unhelpful than anything.
ReplyDelete28 million of the 28.2 million businesses in America, 98%, have 1-19 employees. They need loans of $50-$200,000. In 2007, the average SBA loan was $180,000 and 24% of all SBA loans were under $100,000. Today, the average SBA loan is $485,000 and only 9% are under $100k, and declining. The 98% have been left behind while the SBA supports the 2%. Almost every time the SBA gives out a loan now, it goes to giant businesses who use it to crush the small ones who can’t squeeze a dime from the SBA’s banks.
How did we get here?
In the last five years under Karen Mills, the SBA aggressively and proactively expanded the definition of "small" to allow tens of thousands of very large businesses (500+ employees, $30+ million in revenue) to be reclassified as small. As a result, the banks and the SBA can now give a lot fewer loans to much bigger businesses, and still blow their horn that they support small businesses. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The banks and the venture capitalists (like Startup America) have been lobbying for years to get the SBA to abandon small business in favor of the 2%; the largest businesses in America. It's working. Their next step is to convince the politicians to fold the SBA into the Commerce Department, where it will get lost in the Commerce Department's focus on the top 1/2 of 1% of the largest businesses.
The new SBA leader is a venture capitalist, so this is not likely to get fixed. Sadly, the longer the SBA is impotent and leaderless the less harm it does to the 28 million businesses with 1-19 employees. Hopefully the confirmation process will drag on for a very long time.
The world is upside down.