Inflation, election compounding small business uncertainty: NFIB

The NFIB Small Business Uncertainty Index hit a record high as small business owners report persistent inflation pressures and uncertainty around the upcoming election. NFIB Research Center executive director Holly Wade joins Brad Smith on Wealth! to summarize the survey’s findings.

Uncertainty “hit an all-time high for our 50-year survey, and a lot of that has to do with the uncertainty around the election [and] what that means for small business[es] moving forward, what type of environment they’ll be operating in. And they’re facing a big tax hike, possibly at the end of 2025. So all of that is weighing on small businesses,” Wade tells Yahoo Finance.

“In addition to that, is what the [Federal Reserve] is doing. Looking ahead and seeing how that might impact their decisions on financing capital expenditures [and] expanding their business. Financing, not surprisingly, has been very expensive for many small business owners. And so that’s been weighing on them as far as making decisions about their business and what type of options are available to them in whether it’s investing profits into their business, which is their main source of financing, or paying those high interest rates in financing.”

Wade says this uncertainty “permeates through pretty much every aspect of business operations, including employment. However, employment on our questions related to unfilled job openings [and] hiring plans, those have held up pretty well over the last year.

“We’ve seen a decline in those saying that they have a job opening that they currently aren’t able to fill, but we’re still in very high levels back to where we were in 2019. [It’s] similar with hiring plans. So we’ve fallen off from kind of the stratosphere levels that we’ve seen over the last number of years. But the labor market, as far as what small business owners are reporting in our survey, still looks fairly strong. But again, those uncertainties are going to impact how they move forward.”

Wade re-centers the conversation around the concerns business owners have about future tax rates, which could change as 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act benefits are set to expire at the end of 2025.

“And so that’s one of the main concerns that they have moving into 2025 is that Congress passes legislation to make that permanent, that the administration follows through and signs, and they’re looking for a lot of uncertainty on that front…. We’re still seeing almost a quarter of our members saying inflation is their single biggest problem in operating their business. And so a lot of business owners are looking for some relief on that end or continued relief.”

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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.