Today, as another record jobless report is expected, I am looking at pretty good news.

At its Omaha office, NBDC has packaged 14 loans for $4,670,000 since the first of the year. Of these, eight loans for $1,556,000 have already been approved.

These are not loans to keep afloat stricken businesses, as the pundits would have you believe. One is a debt consolidation loan but all of the others are for business starts, expansions or acquisitions.

What kind of businesses? There are two dentists, two fast food stores and a coffee shop, a chiropractic practice, expansion of a physical therapy clinic, two home improvement start ups, an IT business, and a hair dressing academy. Just the kind of businesses you would expect in a recovery.

People go into business for positive and negative reasons. The negative reasons include losing a job. When you don't have a job there seems less risk in going it on your own than when you have a job. Still, there has to be some reason to believe that there is opportunity in the marketplace. That is reason enough to hope that the recovery is not too far away.