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Small businesses the real casualty of credit mess

by tdhurst · 1 comment

For week we’ve been hearing about mortgage companies shut down, banks being bailed out and corporations being forced into bankruptcy.

No one can pay their bills, but those at the top are getting enough money not only to keep going, but not lay off anyone either.

So who pays? Small businesses. They are so low on the totem pole, no one cares about them. They don’t have enough money to send their late clients to court, nor do they have enough clout to shame them into paying.

Here’s an example. Let’s say a developer secured high-interest, short term loans from a private lender. While this is risky, when you want to get money and build fast, it’s a standard practice.

So developer gets his loan but then private lender goes bankrupt. Developers stop paying their employees, their bills and those small businesses they’ve signed contracts with.

So what bills get paid? Hard costs, like rent, power, etc.

The small businesses who don’t have large reserves of cash are screwed. They have to file bankruptcy and no one is there to bail them out. The companies THEY work with have more than enough money to send them to court for money they don’t have.

Eventually the developer will get his money, but the small business gets none of it.

Wasn’t America built on small businesses? What’s next?

  • Will

    *Post Resurrection*

    You have no idea how many times I’ve rehashed this issue in my head. It really is nothing less than the definition of an economic collapse, and short-term/long-term high-interest/low-interest has almost nothing to do with it. It’s a simple function of how much a person/business has in savings or credit (usually relatively little) versus how much they purchase and produce (usually many times more than they save.) So, a failure of any person/business to produce can and does cause far-reaching domino effects.

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