Your small business wants to refinance a mortgage that is about to mature, but can’t refinance in the private market because the economic meltdown has left your business with real estate worth near the amount of your existing loan, or less.  If this sounds like you, the SBA’s new program may help your business stay afloat.

Imagine one of your employees, driving a company vehicle, rolls through a stop sign and smashes into another driver. The other driver was speeding and was dialing a number on her cell phone. So who is at fault? And most importantly, who has to pay?

In a recent bankruptcy case, the debtor bought goods from the vendor and paid the vendor $1.9 million for the goods.  A court held that the vendor had to return those payments because the payments were not properly authorized by the bankruptcy court.  The payments - for the purchase of inventory from the vendor in the ordinary course of business - were made from the debtor’s operating account, and had to be repaid by the vendor even though the vendor gave the debtor equivalent value in inventory.  This painful lesson for that vendor is a warning to all that a vendor’s obligation to return payments from a bankruptcy debtor is absolute when the payments have not been authorized by the bankruptcy court.  There are no “harmless” or “innocent vendor” exceptions to a bankruptcy trustee’s power to recover such payments.

In a bankruptcy, cash collateral is cash or its equivalent, in which both the debtor and another entity, usually a secured lender, have an interest.  A debtor cannot use its cash collateral unless...

On September 27, 2010, President Obama signed the Small Business Jobs Act (the Act) into law. The Act will benefit small businesses in several ways, including extensions of Small Business Administration (SBA) lending programs and tax breaks.