Small business confidence trends with work truck sales

Small business confidence trends neatly with the sale of work trucks, according to a new oddball kind of index from Bloomberg.

Small businesses often use work trucks and vans, so the direct correlation is not surprising. But the troubling thing is that, starting in May, small business confidence trended down right along with the sale of work trucks.

We’re entering an era of uncertainty that makes capitalists afraid to invest. You have big companies sitting on roughly 2,000 billion dollars by most conservative estimates. They’re worried about the fiscal cliff, debt downgrades of the U.S., and the upcoming election.

In another sign of the times, FedEx independently corroborates the uncertainty. They’ve just issued what’s called negative guidance. Their revenue is great, but looking forward, they see that shipments are declining and more people are degrading shipment quality by selecting the cheapest possible shipping options.

The result is this collective uncertainty impacts us in so many ways by slowing down the underlying rate of economic growth. If we didn’t have all this uncertainty in the small business sector, I saw numbers suggesting that unemployment would be 6% instead of 8%.

When the political class starts putting the U.S. first instead of the R and D by their names, the fundamentals are now in place for a meaningful, robust recovery in these United States.

I told you recently how the housing recovery is underway with home values rising in all but five states. So I am certain when we get our act together as a country — not if — we will have a boomlet if not an outright boom.