Owner survey
NFIB reported that just 7% of owners saw a good time to expand in September, down five points. Optimism slipped below its long-run average as short-term borrowing costs rose.
The FTC and USDA opened a farm-equipment market inquiry covering territorial restrictions, dealer consolidation, repair access and retaliation. Comments are due December 7 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern.
Customs and Border Protection proposed electronic entry deadlines, new mail-shipment data and bonds for informal imports valued at $2,500 or less. The agency estimates first-year private costs above $1bn.
Informa agreed to buy Clarion from Blackstone at a £2.24bn enterprise value and began reviewing a separation of Taylor & Francis. The company will fund the deal partly through a £940m equity placing.
C.H. Robinson agreed to buy RXO for cash and shares in a transaction with an implied $5.8bn value. The standard consideration is $17.25 plus 0.0856 C.H. Robinson shares for each RXO share.
NOAA's final rule raises this year's Gulf red grouper commercial quota to 4.28m pounds, changes the sector allocation, and removes a seasonal closure that mainly constrained recreational red grouper fishing.
CBP estimates 330,000 importers or brokers will file 495,000 CAPE declarations a year as it extends the worksheet used for court-ordered IEEPA tariff refunds.
Britain opened applications for an electricity-cost relief scheme aimed at more than 10,000 manufacturers. Eligible sites must apply by November 30 for support beginning in 2027.
The cash conversion cycle is days inventory plus days receivable minus days payable. Walmart's fiscal 2026 filing produces results from 0.21 to 4.05 days depending on which disclosed receivable balance and averaging method are used.
Starbucks plans to close about 250 North American stores and record roughly $300m of restructuring charges. It now expects about 440 net new stores worldwide in fiscal 2026.
Paychex revenue rose 6 percent to $1.63bn in its fiscal first quarter. The payroll company lifted its growth outlook for professional employer and insurance services while leaving total revenue guidance unchanged.
A new proclamation extends the $100,000 H-1B entry condition through September 2027, although prior agency implementation remains vacated. A companion order tells agencies to consider sponsor layoffs.
CMS paused registration for agents and brokers without 2026 federal marketplace agreements. The moratorium runs until February 1, 2027, unless the agency changes it.
Corpay and CEO Ronald Clarke agreed to pay $100 million for customer redress under a proposed FTC consent order. The settlement remains subject to public comment and final approval.
An executive order gives federal agencies 90 days to review mandatory country of origin labeling for beef, gray wolf recovery status and regulations that affect ranchers. It creates no immediate program.
EPA and the Army proposed treating relatively permanent waters as perennial, with limited interruptions of up to 30 days. The agencies expect fewer federally covered streams and wetlands, particularly in the arid West.
The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index fell to 98.7 in August from 99.8 in July. The share reporting higher sales, net of those reporting lower sales, dropped to negative 9 percent.
IRS Notice 2026-53 supplies the 2026 emissions table for the 45Z clean fuel credit and adds rules for regenerative agriculture and manure based fuels.
The British Business Bank will commit up to £150m to a proposed northern scale-up fund. It expects the fund to make investments of £5m to £15m in high-growth companies.
Form 1099-NEC reports nonemployee services, while Form 1099-MISC reports rents, royalties and specified other payments. For payments made in 2026, the general threshold is $2,000, but several categories keep $10, $600 or $5,000 thresholds and the filing deadlines differ.
The Bancorp Bank plans to stop originating retail and wholesale small-business loans by year-end and eliminate 64 filled positions, about 9 percent of its workforce.
A Friday executive order tells USDA to establish a guaranteed loan program for small and regional beef processors, expand enforcement in livestock markets and deliver three reports within 60 days.
Three tenants measured their own premises against the space they signed for and found a quarter to a third of it idle. Federal law now carries a benchmark of 150 usable square feet per person and a give-back clause below 60 percent occupancy.
One borrower itemised a five year equipment agreement and found the total cash outlay ran 48,805 dollars above the price of the machine. Two others describe the same gap arriving as fees, covenants and delay. Federal law required none of them to be handed a total.
The National Honey Board assessment goes from 1.5 cents a pound to 1.75 on 1 September and 2 cents on 1 January 2027. It is owed only above 250,000 pounds a year.
Intrusion issued a $1,615,000 secured note for $1,500,000 of cash, used it to fund the $1,300,000 second closing for OW Cyber, and pledged all assets and intellectual property behind it.
A final rule filed on Friday removes the regulation under which SBA waived the Administrative Procedure Act exemptions for loans, grants, benefits and contracts. It was issued without notice and comment and takes effect on publication.
Three employers priced their workers compensation cover, from 158 dollars a year to about 180,000. None of the three can explain their number by pointing at a claim they actually had. The rating manuals say why: the figure that enters the calculation is the reserve an insurer has set, not the amount a claim finally costs.
Published answers to the question run from about 1 percent to 15.8 percent. The Small Business Administration's own charge off rate for its 7(a) program was 0.55 percent in fiscal 2024. Every one of those figures is arithmetically defensible, because each divides a different numerator by a different denominator, and the public loan file most of them come from does not record default at all.
Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, USPS Ground Advantage and Parcel Select all rise 6.0 percent on average at midnight on 4 October, and all return to approved levels on 17 January.
Two 11-count indictments from one grand jury, one city and one prosecuting unit. Both allege that Economic Injury Disaster Loan money at 3.75 percent went somewhere the programme did not permit.
The Small Business Administration issued an economic injury declaration for Saline County and six neighbours on 21 August, for storms on 26 and 27 April. Applications close 21 May 2027.
Kenneth C. Sparks III was found guilty of conspiracy, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. The department puts the pandemic loans at $1.2m and says just over $1m of it reached him.
The Commodity Credit Corporation is correcting the Farmer Bridge Assistance rule to add blue and red corn to the definition of corn. Growers shut out of the April deadline get 30 days from publication.
A direct final rule published in May 2025 would strip 10 CFR Part 800 from the books. Its effective date has now been pushed six times, most recently from 1 September to 24 December 2026.
Three employers priced a single hire against the salary they budgeted. Two of them budgeted ninety days to full productivity and got seven months. All three name the same overrun, and it is not a line item: it is the time of the person already on the payroll.
Customs and Border Protection filed a final rule requiring electronic export manifests for all rail cargo leaving for Canada and Mexico. Initial filing is due 24 hours before departure, the rest two hours before.
Access to the National Do Not Call Registry costs $85 per area code from October 1, up from $82, and the most any single entity can be charged rises to $23,425.
The moratorium on new federal Gulf shrimp permits ends after 26 October. The National Marine Fisheries Service proposes extending it to 2036, and asks whether five years would be better. Comments close on 24 September.
Three people who ended a line of business describe what it cost them. One puts the line at about 10 percent of revenue, one at 15 to 20 percent, one at just under half her income. None of them names the lost revenue as the expensive part, and all three describe a long interval between knowing and acting.
The temporary order covers mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, MGM-15 and MGM-16, and runs to 26 August 2028. Retail sale to the public ends on the effective date, and temporary scheduling orders carry no right of judicial review.
A proposed rule filed on Monday would add $103,265 to every H-1B cap-subject petition on top of all existing fees. DHS expects it to raise $8,777,525,000 a year, two thirds of it for agencies that do not adjudicate the petitions.
Three practitioners describe moving a business from one supplier to another, in enterprise software, in search measurement and in advertising accounts. None of them names the migration invoice as the expensive part. All three name the same thing, which is the record the old system held and the new one does not.
Six people describe what global economic conditions changed about their decisions. None of them changed a forecast. Every one changed the structure of a commitment instead, and the Federal Reserve publishes the error table that explains why.
The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index reached 99.8 in July 2026, its highest reading since August 2025, and seven of its ten components ask owners about the future rather than the present. Those seven supplied 23 of the 29 points of component change behind the move. In the same report, the same owners recorded the weakest actual employment reading of the year.
Five owners describe raising their prices and what followed. The reaction they could hear and the reaction that showed up in the numbers came from two different groups of customers, and in every account here the audible one was the smaller and the less informative of the two.
The Labor Department finalised the rescission of its Executive Order 11246 regulations on Thursday, effective 26 October. It puts the annual saving at $996.37m across roughly 111,832 contractor entities.
Five people who send invoices for a living describe what shortened the wait. Every remedy that worked moved the decision earlier than the due date, and two of them found a large part of the delay had been sitting on their own side of it.
NMFS is closing the commercial sectors for red snapper, blueline tilefish and the scamp and yellowmouth grouper complex in South Atlantic federal waters from 24 August through 31 December, in three notices filed within the same minute.
The FDA has filed petitions to widen gardenia blue to 20 food categories and safflower extract to 17, and a third to allow acetone as a solvent in making carrot oil.
Four people who move money across borders describe losing it in the same place: a conversion somebody else priced, found later at reconciliation rather than at the till.
CBP is reviewing every importer of record record on file. Thirty days after publication it will void the number of any importer whose Form 5106 details are inaccurate or incomplete, which stops that importer entering goods.
The United States legal entity dataset of OpenCorporates Limited is now inside the Do Not Pay Working System, effective immediately. The comment period on the proposal ran 15 days and produced nothing.
Four operators describe noticing the same macro shift inside their own order books weeks before it reached a published statistic. Each rebuilt planning around a private signal rather than a forecast, and the Federal Reserve has a version of the same problem.
The Farm Service Agency has defined de minimis as 10 percent or less of total revenue loss. Producers above that line repay the gap between a 90 percent and a 70 percent payment factor on their 2022 disaster payment.
For two decades the uncertain number in a small business plan sat on the revenue line. Three owners in three industries describe the same inversion: the expense side became the volatile one, and each rebuilt the cost half of the plan rather than re-forecasting revenue.
The company said in February that its main co-packer's owner intended to close the plant on 31 July. A deal with the facility's new owner begins on 15 September, on the old terms, with inventory covering the gap.
The final rule adopts the March 2025 interim rule and goes further, dropping United States company applicants and FinCEN identifier updates. FinCEN will delete the data once and confirm nothing to filers.
The India Connection LLC has complained to the Federal Maritime Commission against CMA CGM (America) and two intermediaries over detention charges. An answer is due within 25 days and a final decision by 23 February 2028.
The Food and Drug Administration has proposed making GRAS notification mandatory for substances added to human and animal food. Comments run 120 days, and firms would get 18 months after any final rule takes effect.
The Small Business Administration has finalised the removal of the rebuttable presumption of social disadvantage for individually owned 8(a) firms. It takes effect 30 days after publication and reaches every pending individual application.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration proposes to codify English language proficiency as an out-of-service violation and to narrow the border commercial zone exception. It estimates 9,000 drivers a year and $14.4 million in annual cost.
A final rule filed on Thursday lets Fireworks Certification Agencies approve display fireworks and entertainment pyrotechnics, not only consumer ones. It takes effect 30 days after publication.
Translucent Solar told the Foreign-Trade Zones Board it wants to make photovoltaic modules at Summerville, South Carolina. The glass and the cells must enter in privileged foreign status, which cannot be abandoned.
Fiberboard containers could not be reused for live animals at all. Every box in a strapped bundle would need its own address label and a sequential number, and Flat Rate packaging would not be eligible.
NMFS is closing commercial greater amberjack harvest in Gulf federal waters from 8 August through 31 December, projecting the 85,746 lb catch target will be reached by 5 August. That target was cut in February after 2025 landings exceeded the limit.
Sixteen final rules, dockets HM-268A through HM-268P, went on public inspection together on Monday morning. Three carry a quantified figure, the largest $14.4m a year. Thirteen do not.
The DEA proposes adding seven esters of PMK glycidic acid to list I, after 154 international incident reports since 2021 involving more than 104 metric tons of the ethyl ester alone.
The federal Form 1099-K reporting threshold is $20,000 and more than 200 transactions, restored retroactively to 2022 by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Money & World tracked the Internal Revenue Service's own forecast of how many of these forms would be filed across four consecutive editions of its projection series.
All 10 EPA regions have proposed the 2027 construction general permit to replace the one expiring in February, and the agency puts the whole national saving at $25,383 a year.
The Labor Department updated the adverse effect wage rates that H-2A farms must pay and set the average used to size labour contractor bonds at $15.96. The rates themselves live on a website.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a hearing notice for public inspection on July 29, 2026 at 8:45 a.m., document 2026-15340, RIN 3046-AB37, publishing July 30.
USDA filed an interim rule treating all wetland determinations issued after November 28, 1990 as certified if the person affected was notified and given appeal rights, responding to a 2024 court vacatur. Comments are due sixty days after publication.
The Environmental Protection Agency published a final rule on July 28, 2026, effective the same day, extending compliance dates in the Workplace Chemical Protection Programs for perchloroethylene and carbon tetrachloride under section 6 of the Toxic Substances Control Act.
Florida Statute 553.899 makes a structural milestone inspection mandatory for condominium and cooperative buildings three habitable stories or taller once they reach 30 years of age. Coastal counties may pull that trigger forward to 25 years, and Collier County has. The first two years of statewide data show where the real cost lands, and it is not the inspection.
A final rule filed for publication on Friday lowers the minimum soluble solids content for pasteurized orange juice from 10.5 to 10 degrees Brix and raises the share of mandarin-group juice permitted in it from 10 percent to 15 percent by volume.
Following a request from the United States Trade Representative received on July 13, the International Trade Commission instituted Investigation No. TA-201-80 under section 202 of the Trade Act of 1974.
Proclamation 11012 says the 10 percent import surcharge continues in effect through 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on July 24, 2026, unless Congress extends it by an Act. Section 122 of the Trade Act caps such a surcharge at 150 days.
A two-month suspension under Act 2026-604 expired, and retailers resumed collecting the state rate on SNAP-eligible food.
The summer 2026 update lets business users download CP575 EIN verification and pay toward an offer in compromise.
Chief Counsel Advice 202628009 holds that an obligation the general partner can choose not to call is not a payment obligation.
A Mississippi federal court let a $5.4m employee retention credit refund claim proceed but dismissed the declaratory judgment count.
Form 15644 replaces the old supplemental group ruling submission. It is due 30 to 90 days before the year closes.
CBP has wired roughly $71 billion including interest through its CAPE system since the Supreme Court voided the IEEPA tariffs.
The IRS will abate three common penalties without a request from taxpayers who have three clean years behind them.
The business standard mileage rate rises to 76 cents from 72.5 cents for travel on or after July 1.
Alaska went to $14.00 from $13.00, DC to $18.40 from $17.95, and Oregon reset its three regional tiers.
Notice 2026-42 puts the section 45I reference price at $2.20 per 1,000 cubic feet for tax years beginning in 2026.
Senate Bill 1233 adds a bachelor's plus two years of experience path to licensure, effective August 28.
Effective July 4, the cumulative ceiling across the two programs doubled from $5 million to $10 million.
The NFIB index gained 2.1 points from 95.3 in May. Inflation is now the top problem for 21 percent of owners.
Notice 2026-43 adds two synthetic rubbers to the section 4672 list at $9.46 and $9.64 a ton for importers.
Nothing filed under that subtopic yet.