Bracing for the Turn: The Fed Weighs Its First Hike Since 2023

Key Trends

• Goldman Sachs’ latest 10,000 Small Businesses Voices survey — 1,256 owners polled by Babson College and David Binder Research — found 76% now use AI, and 93% of those call the impact positive, mostly through efficiency gains. But only 14% have it fully embedded in core operations, and roughly half of AI-using firms have put no money into training or integration — adoption is outrunning implementation.

  Review

  “Roughly half of AI-using firms have put no money into training or integration” is presented as part of the Goldman Sachs finding, but this figure traces to a separate SBA Office of Advocacy analysis of Census Bureau data (~2025), not the Goldman survey — verify and re-attribute to its own source.

• A Small Business Expo Research survey released September 14 found 45.2% of owners would replace an employee with AI “if necessary,” and one in four already have or would. That cuts against Goldman’s finding that 87% of AI-using owners see the technology as augmenting, not displacing, their workforce.

  Unverified

  The Small Business Expo figures come from the firm’s own proprietary research; no independent survey corroborating the 45.2% or “1 in 4” numbers was found.

Notable Businesses & Launches

No significant developments today.

Funding & Investment

No significant developments today.

Regulatory & Economic Context

• Update: Monday’s brief flagged roughly 85% hike odds ahead of today’s Fed decision; that probability has since climbed to about 93% on the CME FedWatch tool, with the FOMC’s announcement due at 2 p.m. ET and Chair Kevin Warsh’s press conference at 2:30. A quarter-point move would lift the target range to 3.75%–4.00% and mark the Fed’s first hike since 2023, reversing the three rate cuts it delivered in September, October, and December of last year. Bankrate notes the reversal would flip the borrowing assumptions many owners have budgeted around all year, and lands the same morning as the Census Bureau’s August retail sales report, one of the last major data points the Fed will weigh before voting.

• Even as the Fed leans toward tightening, the SBA is loosening on a narrower front: its FY2027 fee schedule, effective October 1, waives the upfront guaranty fee entirely on 7(a) loans of $700,000 or less to manufacturers (NAICS 31–33), rural businesses, and food-supply-chain operators — expanding a waiver that had covered manufacturers alone in FY2026. It builds on the agency’s “Grocery Guarantee” push, which has already delivered $30 million in 90%-guaranteed loans to food-supply-chain borrowers since May.

  Review

  The “FY2027 fee schedule, effective October 1” claim links to SBA’s June 3 announcement about the $30M Grocery Guarantee milestone, not to an SBA release about the FY2027 fee schedule itself — the fee-waiver details (dollar threshold, NAICS scope, FY2026 comparison) aren’t supported by that link. Swap in the correct SBA fee-schedule source.

Takeaway