Ruth Simon
speaker
180 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2017
last heard Dec 2020
Ruth Simon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Small businesses are facing two different challenges.
One is there's a resurgence in cases in some parts of the country, and that's leading to more social distancing and additional pressures.
And also small businesses, many of them are starting to run through the government aid they received from the Federal Paycheck Protection Program.
And the big problem is
There was this thought we would have a V-shaped recovery, but it looks like that's not happening.
It's definitely one of the issues for some of the businesses.
There's also even in places where we're not seeing a rise.
there's a fear that cases may rise.
And you have to keep in mind that small businesses, they operate with thinner cash reserves and thinner margins than bigger companies, and their businesses are less diversified, so they're more vulnerable to begin with.
That depends where you are.
We've seen cases where people just want to go back out, but we also have lots of people who are still staying home or being very cautious.
And one of the big questions is, are we going to see fundamental changes of behavior?
And even if we don't see fundamental changes in behavior, how long is it going to be till we return to something that feels more normal?
For the ones who got funds early, one of the issues was the initial limitations where you had eight weeks to spend the money and a certain amount had to be spent on payroll.
It's a little more flexible now, but many of the first recipients have run through their aid.
I think they need more assistance.
They would like to see that assistance targeted to the sectors and the companies that need aid most.
Now, a lot of the hourly worker data we've been looking at comes from main street sectors that involve a lot of human face-to-face contact.
So you can think about things like restaurants or gyms or retailers or hair salons.
And what we saw is that hourly workers, that fell back quite a lot.
Showing 61–80 of 180 · page 4 of 9
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