News release: “As the Senate prepares to consider small business jobs legislation this week, a new report by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC) shows that lending to small businesses has declined in 2010, small business hiring remains flat and the smallest firms continue to reduce hiring…The report, entitled Small Business Employment: Bank Lending Restrains Job Creation, uses an unpublished data series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to update a May 2010 JEC report analyzing small business hiring between January 2001 and March 2010. The update, which includes data through May 2010, shows that small business hiring has not started to increase, although larger and mid-sized firms continue to increase hiring. Additionally, the report finds that the number of small business loans and the dollar value of these loans are both dropping. The number of loans made to small businesses, which peaked at 27.2 million in the second quarter of 2008, has fallen by over 4.8 million since then, a drop of 17.8 percent. The total value of those loans fell by $60 billion to approximately $650 billion.”