By Bill Britt
Alabama Political Reporter
MONTGOMERY— A new survey shows that small business owners in Alabama are more optimistic about the future, than they are about today.
A survey of conducted by Thumbtack.com and developed with economists at Bloomberg captures the economic sentiment of roughly 800 respondents in Alabama on a scale of 1 to 10. The data collected over two years and released last week found that Alabama improved across 6 of the 8 sub-indexes tracked by Thumbtack in the past year.
Alabama still falls in the top half of states nationally for its small business economic sentiment, but fell from 17 to 25 in the nationwide ranking in May.
Small business owners in the State were more optimistic about the future than they were about current conditions, reporting a persistent 23 point spread in their expectations for future financial conditions, as opposed to today’s climate.
Alabama businesses reported that credit conditions in the State stalled in May, having fallen from a top 35 percentile nationwide during both March and April, but are now in the bottom 20th.
Nationwide there was a 25 percent reduction in businesses citing “uncertain economic conditions” as their number one concern for the future. And nationally, business owners reported an overwhelming optimism about the future.
