Overall, SMB is quite robust according to a group that studies this on behalf of the Federal government. I was interested in this because I wanted to nail down market sizing for SMB which is all over the map. I’ve quoted 90 million as the total number of small businesses in the U.S., a number certainly not supported by this report. At any rate, it’s big. Hat tip to Dennis for sending me the report.

In summary, of the nearly 26 million firms in the United States, most are very small—97.5 percent of employer and nonemployer firms have fewer than 20 employees. Yet cumulatively, these firms account for half of our nonfarm real gross domestic product, and they have generated 60 to 80 percent of the net new jobs over the past decade. Entrepreneurs rightly command enormous respect, and their contributions to the U.S. economy are followed by academics and policymakers alike.

Despite the strong culture of entrepreneurship that permeates the U.S., one table in the report jumped out at me as a stark and depressing commentary on the state of public finance markets in the Sarbanes-Oxley world we now live in.

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