The subindex covering expected business conditions dropped 10 points to a -9 reading, and sales expectations dropped three points to zero.<\/p>\n
The report said the drop in sales expectations may explain why fewer owners planned to increase inventories. The inventory index dropped three points to -7 in February. Small-business owners saw some improvement in earnings, although the trend remained negative. The index for better earnings rose three points to -39.<\/p>\n
The job-creation index was unchanged at -1 in February. But the pace of layoffs slowed dramatically, and slightly more owners, on net, reported job openings were hard to fill. Consequently, the report said, “Net job creation will appear in coming months, but the gains will be painfully slow.”<\/p>\n
Inflationary pressures were nearly nonexistent last month. Seasonally adjusted, the net percentage of owners raising prices was -21%, down 3 points from January; more small businesses were cutting prices than raising them.<\/p>\n
Small-business owners in the U.S. turned slightly more pessimistic in February, although employment readings grew a shade more positive. The Small Business Optimism Index lost 1.3 points to 88.0 last month, reported the National Federation of Independent Business in a press release Tuesday. The NFIB noted that only two of 10 components posted gains last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":850,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-406689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/850"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/img><\/a>
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