Confidence among America’s small-business owners remains near an all-time high, despite concerns about how the Trump administration’s trade policies might impact businesses in the coming months. For the first time since CNBC and SurveyMonkey began taking the pulse of Main Street more than a year ago, a majority of small-business owners across the country say business conditions are “good.”
The CNBC/SurveyMonkey Q2 Small Business Confidence Index dipped to 61, down from the record first-quarter reading of 62. The decline can be attributed to a sharp increase in the number of small-business owners who expect trade policy to have a negative impact on their businesses in the next year. That number rose from 17 percent in the first quarter, to 28 percent in this quarter’s poll.
The index is calculated on a scale from 0–100 and is based on the responses to eight key questions. A zero indicates no confidence, and a score of 100 indicates perfect confidence. The quarter-to-quarter change is within the margin of error.
The CNBC/SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey, an online poll with responses from more than 2,000 small-business owners each quarter, was conducted from April 11–17.
“Concerns about trade having a negative effect on small business is at an all-time high this quarter,” said SurveyMonkey’s chief research officer, Jon Cohen. “This is the first time since we started doing the survey that we have a year-on-year comparison, and we’ve been asking about trade not just after the White House raised prospects of implementing tariffs, but we’ve been asking this question for five quarters.”
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