If you are a small business owner, or work for one, you may like to read a post on how to cope with the likelihood of a forthcoming recession — even worldwide depression.

“Clearly, we’re in for the roughest of rides over the next two years, and possibly longer. Although interest rates are tumbling and will continue to do so, even in the eurozone, the increasing lack of liquidity around the world as banks horde cash, Scrooge-like, will permit little flexibility.”

Of course, some people get rich in the harshest of climates by betting on market falls. Given that it’s the new markets in financial instruments and derivatives that started this off in the first place, it’s ironic that some savvy souls will probably make billions out of other people’s misery.

Read the post in Small Business Booster.

Venture capitalist, Paul Graham has written another excellent piece on web startups. His message is that there will be more and more of them.

So my first prediction about the future of web startups is pretty straightforward: there will be a lot of them. When starting a startup was expensive, you had to get the permission of investors to do it. Now the only threshold you have to get over is whether you have the courage to. Even that threshold is getting lower, as people watch others take the plunge and survive. In the last batch of startups we funded, we had several founders who said they’d thought of applying before, but weren’t sure and got jobs instead. It was only after hearing reports of friends who’d done it that they decided to try it themselves.

He believes that, although, starting a web business is difficult, it’s nothing like as soul-destroying as a 9-5 job.

In a startup you have lots of worries, but you don’t have that feeling that your life is flying by like you do in a big company. Plus in a startup you could make orders of magnitude more money. If the number of startups increases dramatically, then the people whose job is to judge startups are going to have to get better at it. I’m thinking particularly of investors and acquirers. We now get on the order of 1000 applications a year. What are we going to do if we get 10,000?

It’s hard to imagine the internet ever getting full up, so the prospects are there for anyone with a good idea, technical know-how and the initiative to carry it through.

Read the whole of the article.

Ever dreamed of quitting the day job to forge a new business online? It sounds simple enough : working from the comfort of your own home, low costs and master of your own time?

But what about the complications? The technical side, for example. The long lead-ins to a sustainable income. And, of course, the intense competition for a large, but limited pot of money on the internet.

John Evans, who founded Syntagma Media — an internet content provider — has given an interview about the trials of creating an online business to Gerry Reynolds, business consultant and retail analyst.

Here’s a sneak preview :

Gerry : What are the economics of an online income stream? […]

John : If you set no upper limits, you’re really at the mercy of events. It’s no good having a $10m business if your costs are $11m. Mr Micawber defined that problem 150 years ago.

The trick is to set an upper boundary that gives you the best split between receipts and obligations, building in the vagaries of the tax system, of course, and depending on the amount of effort you can comfortably provide. Everyone will reach a different conclusion, but it has to be within your comfort zone. You are, after all, in this for the long haul.

Read both posts here : #

In the UK, buy-to-let property has been a top target for many investors, big and small. Many people are entering the thriving market as a substitute for pensions.

Now, it seems, the prospects are not so good, as interest rates rise, putting pressure on borrowers, and house prices start to fall. Worse, landlords will be hit harder than the lenders in the prevailing conditions.

Indicative of this, the share price of Paragon, Britain’s biggest buy-to-let lender, has fallen 20 percent this year. This is despite the firm being the most conservative mortgage lender in the sector. Only 0.15 percent of its lending book is in arrears, compared with 0.64 percent across the buy-to-let market, and 0.89 percent in the mortgage sector as a whole.

The company asserts, however, that landlords generate 125 percent of their mortage costs, giving Paragon some protection from a downturn. Similarly, it makes 90 percent of its money from its backbook, so plummeting mortgage applications won’t hit it very hard.

Paragon shares might just be a good buy, despite the state of the market. Whether landlords with their pensions tied up in property will see it that way, remains to be seen. Play it long, is good advice here.