Economics
Small Businesses Are Dying by the Thousands — And No One Is Tracking the Carnage
- They simply close down and never show up in bankruptcy tallies
- More than half of owners are worried their firm won’t survive
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Big companies are going bankrupt at a record pace, but that’s only part of the carnage. By some accounts, small businesses are disappearing by the thousands amid the Covid-19 pandemic, and the drag on the economy from these failures could be huge.
This wave of silent failures goes uncounted in part because real-time data on small business is notoriously scarce, and because owners of small firms often have no debt, and thus no need for bankruptcy court.