Why Main Street Businesses Are Holding Their Breath

Plus: Half of U.S. Cybersecurity Bosses Say They’ve Considered Quitting the Profession

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Cheddar's Big Business This Week
August 06, 2026

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While we’ve all been focused on big business here at Big Business This Week, editor Peter Green wondered how small business has been faring. He spoke with Guy Berger, a macroeconomist and labor-market specialist at small-business payroll provider Homebase, about small-business resilience, rising wages, tariffs, immigration and why the outlook could become more difficult later this year. 

What’s happening on Main Street, and what’s stressing small business owners most?

In some sense, it’s kind of amazing how resilient Main Street is, given that this has been a very active policy environment for the last year and a half. Small-business sentiment has seesawed. There were periods when people were very excited about how things were going and periods when people were less excited, even alarmed. What has changed in 2026 is that businesses have gotten used to it. I don’t think they’re necessarily happy or not stressed, but the incremental degree of stress this year relative to last is probably negative. A lot of the adjustment and shock is already behind us. Now it’s: "This is the environment we’re in. How do we adjust to it?" Regardless of whether business owners like what has happened, it’s not new anymore.

How are tariffs, high interest rates and the war in Iran affecting small businesses?

A lot of these things are negatively affecting their businesses. There are some businesses that benefit here and there, but there is a separate question of whether these problems are enough to offset good news elsewhere. Consumers, despite higher interest rates, are still spending. Have these things wrecked the small-business economy? The answer is no. Would small-business owners be happier, and would the small-business economy be healthier, if we didn’t have these headwinds? The answer is probably yes. Are things amazing and the best they possibly could be? Probably not. Have things gone totally off the rails? Absolutely not. People are managing to muddle through. There are extreme cases. Some businesses have essentially been forced to declare bankruptcy. There have also been businesses for whom these things are advantageous. If you are producing in an import-competing area and don’t rely on imported parts, this has actually been great for you. But in aggregate, it has been manageable. Business owners would probably say: “I’m sticking through it. Things aren’t so bad that I have to close up shop.”

What is happening with jobs? Are small businesses hiring or firing?

If you’re an employee, things have gotten a little better this year. I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily good, but they’re a little better. We’ve seen turnover pick up, which suggests workers are leaving some firms and employers are having a little trouble holding on to them. Employees of small businesses seem to be seeing more opportunities than they saw last year. From the perspective of businesses, hiring has not picked up. They may have been caught a little off guard by this turnaround. They are losing employees, but they haven’t managed to crank up hiring. And there has been a little shift in bargaining power at small businesses from owners to employees.

What is happening to wages?

Wage growth in our small-business data has been 6% over the past year. That is higher than the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which is closer to 3.5% or 4%., so faster than overall inflation. There is a very strong K-shaped economy stuck in people’s minds. That may have been true a year and a half ago, but wage growth at the bottom is now comparable to or faster than wage growth at the top. Of course the businesses themselves may not be excited about this. Turnover was up about 4% year over year in July, and it was up even more in June. We’re not back to the Great Resignation. But if you think about a pendulum, for a while it was swinging toward business owners finding it easier to find talent. Now it has swung a little bit the other way.

How is the immigration crackdown affecting the labor market?

The immigration crackdown slows down both halves of the equation. It slows labor supply, because we’re adding fewer workers to the pool that can get jobs. But it also slows labor demand, because immigrants spend money. If you’re adding fewer of them, spending growth is going to slow down. The main story is the change from an environment where companies were seeing huge amounts of available labor coming onto the market to one where they don’t. If business suddenly picks up, companies could find themselves facing a labor shortage. There isn’t a huge overhang of available labor the way there was coming out of COVID or coming out of 2010.

Are more small businesses opening or closing?

Compared with the late 2010s, there is a lot more job creation and destruction happening through establishments opening and closing. In the past, much of the change came from an existing business cutting its workforce in half or increasing the number of employees it had. Now, more job creation is coming from businesses opening, and more job losses are coming from businesses shutting down. We simultaneously have relatively low hiring, low firing and low quitting. But the hiring and layoffs that do occur are coming more than in the past from new businesses or businesses that are dying.

What do small businesses need, and what happens if they don’t get it?

Businesses importing tariffed goods wish they weren’t tariffed. Businesses struggling with energy prices wish energy prices were lower. Businesses facing high interest rates wish interest rates would go down. Right now, the headwinds are manageable. Companies are adjusting and can keep going. The worry is the right-hand tail: What if all these problems become much bigger toward the end of the year? What if the energy crisis continues and intensifies? What if inflation becomes a bigger problem? Then, instead of saying, “I can manage” or “I can muddle through,” small businesses could really start struggling.

This transcript was edited and condensed for space and clarity.

—Peter S. Green

Big Businesses mentioned this week

This week, big business!

Elon’s World

  • Space X’d? The big talk isn’t working any more. On Wednesday, SpaceX $SPCX ( ▲ 4.7% ) delivered its first-ever quarterly results as a public company, losing $541 million, despite nearly doubling revenue to $7.8 billion from a year earlier. One culprit: $18.4 billion in cap-ex for the quarter, or about a fifth of the $85.7 billion it raised in its June IPO. Pushing aside his CFO, Elon Musk told analysts and shareholders on a conference call that SpaceX is on track to spend $100 billion in cap-ex this year. But those major spending numbers and a lack of commensurate revenue only served to spook investors, Musk’s unsupported claim of $1 trillion in revenue by 2030 notwithstanding. Shares closed down about 13% on Wednesday after the announcement, their lowest ever. At $108, their value is half of its recent peak of over $220. David Wagner, a portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, politely explained why the shares tumbled. “Elon has continued to surprise investors on what innovation and technology can do, but there has always been a mismatch in terms of the time frame of when that execution is going to occur," he told Reuters. And that mismatch is about to get even bigger. Lockups expire this week for some early investors, who are expected to flood the market with shares, after making as much as 10x their money. Some 900 million shares of SpaceX are eligible to be sold, which could be worth close to $100 billion, more than the IPO’s $85.7 billion. The Wall Street Journal reports that some shady business means not everyone who thought they were holding pre-IPO stakes in SpaceX will cash out. Over 1,000 special purpose vehicles, or SPVs, hold SpaceX shares, a portal for investors to buy in before the IPO, but the SPVs are opaque and lightly regulated, and some dumped their SpaceX shares years ago.

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The Usual Suspects

  • Up (and up?) - What is up with the stock market? War, tariffs, inflation, AI displacement, $39 trillion national debt, energy crisis, stagnant employment. Despite it all, the U.S. stock market just keeps rising. The Dow peaked this week at 54,744 on Wednesday; the S&P 500hit 7,793 points, both records. The Nasdaq 100 hit 29,885 on Wednesday, just shy of its all-time record. Why? Most of it seems to be hope. Despite no ceasefire with Iran lasting more than a few days, investors see the latest hope of a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz as a sign the global economy will keep pumping away, and oil won’t get too pricey (it’s down from around $100 to about $80 a barrel in a week). Strong earnings from big tech helped, consumers keep shopping, companies keep investing in AI, Scott Bessent successfully propped up the Japanese yen (for now—see below…) and everyone can keep ignoring the national debt. Or maybe everyone’s just trying to grab what they can before the volcano blows?

  • The MountWarner Chronicles: Is David Ellison in hock for more than he can ever pay off? That’s the question going around Hollywood right now, after a judge set a trial date for March to assess claims of antitrust violations by a dozen state attorneys general in Ellison’s planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery $WBD ( ▲ 1.89% ) by his own Paramount Skydance $PSKY ( ▲ 3.43% ) . The deal should have closed next month, and each quarter of delay will cost Ellison a $650 million payment to WBD shareholders. Paramount’s balance sheet is weak: a market cap of just $9.2 billion, assets of $44.5 billion, and debt of $15.5 billion, on a deal that will cost it about $81 billion ($111 billion including debt) and that’s largely financed by dad and some Middle Eastern investment funds. But Larry Ellison, the Oracle $ORCL ( ▼ 0.67% ) oligarch, has just seen his firm’s credit rating cut to BBB- by S&P, while Moody’s issued a negative outlook on massive AI data center spending with little evidence of a return so far. With the war in Iran ratcheting up the anxiety levels in the Gulf, that capital may not stick around if the trial drags on. Ellison took to the New York Times’s opinion page Wednesday, arguing that a Paramount Warner combo would only account for 13% of viewing time on U.S. TVs when stacked up against Apple $AAPL ( ▲ 0.45% ) , Netflix $NFLX ( ▼ 0.71% ) and even YouTube $GOOGL ( ▼ 1.43% ) , so the states (all 12 are blue) aren’t really suing over a coming monopoly. “The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN,” Ellison wrote. He says yes. But with all the debt and now a billion-dollar delay, another issue is whether he can be trusted as a steward of Paramount's business. Shares in Paramount are up more than 10% this week, even as the company missed its earnings target by nearly half, reporting 8 cents a share profit against SEG’s 15-cent prediction. Still, Paramount is down 25% since Ellison took over, and it’s 55% off a mid-September ‘25 peak.

  • Happy Days for Disney: Other studios and theme parks may be facing crunch time, but new CEO Josh D’Amaro seems to have found the glass slipper at Disney $DIS ( ▲ 2.78% ) : Revenue’s up 7%, and real profits are too, with theme parks and cruises seeing their visitor count rise by 10%, and Toy Story 5 raking in more than a billion dollars in global ticket sales this year. About 45% of that goes back to Disney, which spent about $250 million to make the animated film. (the latest Star Wars installment flopped, however, as did the live action Moana remake despite Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson wearing a wig to entertain people of all ages). But the good news keeps coming: Disney’s already sold out ads for next year’s Valentine’s Day Super Bowl, simulcast on ESPN and ABC, with some change coming to Disney’s cable business: It’s sold its half interest in A+E to Hearst for $1.2 billion, has partnered with TikTok to let TikTokers use Disney characters to create content and show some of it on Disney+, and plans to expand its FAST (free ad-supported television) as consumers increasingly cut the cord and agree to sit through commercials to get their kicks for free. Overall, earnings rose to $2.06 from $1.61 a year ago. Shares are up about 3% since Tuesday’s close. 

The Short Stack

  • Cyberfatigue: Half of U.S. cybersecurity bosses say they’ve considered quitting the profession as AI agents like Anthropic’s $ANTHZZX ( ▼ 0.21% ) Mythos and other LLMs make their job impossible, according to a survey by Absolute Security, a company that provides cybersecurity tools. The report appears to be more than just a scare tactic to boost sales. It surveyed 1,000 CISOs in the U.S. and the U.K. Barely half of the CISOs (57%) say they trust AI tools to protect their data; 43% say the latest AI tools are too risky for their organizations to adopt, and 60% say their C-suites and boards are pressuring them to adopt AI faster than they can govern it and secure it.

  • Failing Times? The New York Times $NYT ( ▼ 1.08% ) said it added another 280,000 subscribers in the second quarter, making it the most widely-read news organization in the world, with 13.35 million subscribers. Revenue jumped 11.2% to $762.5 million in the quarter, and adjusted operating profit zoomed 16.1% to $155.3 million. Still, fears that subscriber growth may be slowing sent shares plunging 13% on Wednesday, which some analysts called an overreaction. 

  • Fore-play? Troubled golf circuit LIV says it will be back for 2027, and beyond, after finding an investor who it said would “carry and fund” the tournament into next year. Bloomberg News identified the investor as the private credit arm of U.K. investment firm BC Partners. LIV, which plays several tournaments a year on golf courses owned by President Trump, recently lost its funding from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund after $5 billion of losses. It will be interesting to see what kind of collateral LIV was able to post in exchange for the financing.

  • It takes money to lose money: Call it the crash-and-burn of the week: Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24-year-old AI genius who left OpenAI to start his own hedge fund investing in AI-related stocks and pre-IPO companies was managing about $45 billion at the start of July, much of it from wealthy silicon valley types and their family offices. But investors got spooked by the recent downturn in AI stocks and the ongoing question of whether all that investment in data centers will actually bring in revenue. Redemptions gutted the fund, forcing Aschenbrenner to offload all his holdings in publicly traded companies to Ken Griffin’s Citadel as about $35 billion left the fund through redemptions and losses. Aschenbrenner was getting married the weekend the margin call came, and put off his honeymoon to liquidate. But you can’t keep a good man down. This week, Aschenbrenner put more than $500 million into an unnamed privately held company. “We took the steps that were necessary to fight another day,” Aschenbrenner told investors in a letter on Friday.

Trumplandia

  • Scott Bessent’s Yen for Intervention. There’s nothing a one-time forex trader in George Soros’ organization likes better than a currency crisis, where Masters of the Universe get to move vast amounts of cash to prop up or knock down other countries. In fact, Bessent reportedly made investors $1 billion betting against the yen in those days. Now, his job is defending the U.S. dollar. So when skyrocketing public debt began to undermine the Japanese yen, Bessent used a Covid-era finance tool to sell euros and prop up the yen. What’s this all about? Well, Japan has so much debt that if the yen kept falling against other currencies, Japan’s central bank would have to sell some of the U.S. Treasury bonds it holds. That would force the U.S. to offer higher interest rates on its bonds, and raise the cost of servicing the U.S.’s unprecedented debt mountain. But simply buying yen with dollars could reduce the dollar’s value. Bessent said Japan’s economy is strong and the yen is undervalued, adding that he’s ready to intervene again. Still, his record is a bit mixed: when he ran his own hedge fund in the teens and into the 20’s, erratic performance cost him 90% of the assets under management. And it’s not clear more intervention will fix the problem. “The yen is weak not because of speculators causing yen to be undervalued,” Robin Brooks of the Brookings institution told the New York Times.  “The yen is weak and falling because Japan has so much public debt.”

  • The family business: The problem with lawsuits is that if you sue someone, they can respond and make public stuff you might not want them to say. Donald Trump made a big deal after his first term of being “de-banked” by some of the largest U.S. financial institutions, which he claimed had it in  for him and other conservatives, and in 2025 he sued Capital One, the seventh-largest U.S. bank. Now CapOne has responded : “Documents and Plaintiffs’ own ‌allegations make clear that Capital One closed ‌Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (‘AML’) reasons,” the bank said in a court filing. “The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by ‌Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance.”

  • What’s Insider Trading? How would you like a split-second advantage in knowing what Donald Trump is going to tweet, er post, on his Truth Social platform? News of everything from air strikes on Iran to tariffs on Canada could make you millions if you’re the first to trade. Well, all ya gotta do is join the five Wall Street trading houses that are already paying $100,000 a month for the API (the “firehose feed”) of Truth Social. “This is insider trading by definition,” Gian Luca Clementi, an economics professor at NYU Stern School of Business, told Fortune.  A spokeswoman for Trump Media & Technology Group $DJT ( ▼ 0.7% ) said the posts are already “publicly available information.” TMTG shares are down 40% in the past year. 

  • There’s no such thing as bad publicity: TKO Group $TKO ( ▲ 2.31% ), the Ari Emanuel company that manages UFC fights, said it lost $30 million on the White House lawn battle it held June 14th for Trump’s birthday.  Emanuel called the event “a roaring success” for TKO, regardkess, because of all the exposure it got. 

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Peter S. Green is a veteran reporter and editor who has spent more than two decades covering business and finance from Eastern Europe to New York City, and has worked for Bloomberg News, The New York Post, The New York Times and The Messenger. He lives in New York City and is always looking for the next big story. Email him here.