Research

55%
The drought across the country has reached record proportions.

In its monthly drought report, the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., announced that 55% of the country was in a moderate to extreme drought at the end of June.

The percentage of affected land is the largest since the 1950s. In December of 1956, 58% of the country was covered by drought. The conditions expanded last month in the West, the Great Plains and the Midwest, driven by the 14th warmest and 10th driest June on record, the report said.

Hot lending
With summer’s arrival, banks have jumped head-first back in the small business lending. The Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index, a monthly analysis of 1,000 loan applications on Biz2credit.com, found that approvals in June by big banks ($10 billion in assets) jumped a half percentage point to 11.1% from 10.6% in May 2012. The figure was well above the paltry 8.9% approval rate a year ago in June 2011.

Additionally, small bank lending jumped to 47.5% in June 2012, up two percentage points from 45.5% in May 2012 and up a full five percentage points higher than the 42.5.% approval rate in May 2011.

Social confidence
More businesses feel confident about how to use social media to support business goals and create brand identity, according to the 2012 FedEx/Ketchum Social Media Benchmarking Study. The research shows that, through social media, these companies believe they are particularly effective at strengthening relationships among customers (51%), the general public (52%) and partners and suppliers (40%). In addition, 85% of the companies who use social media to engage employees reported that employee participation in their organization’s social business efforts increased over the past 12 months. These companies believe they are effectively using these strategies with employees in the social space to:

To learn more about social media and how green industry pros are using it, read our June cover package at bit.ly/LLsocial.

$3.62
Consumers got relief at the pump in June, but not in many other places.

According to CNN, The Consumer Price Index, the key measure of retail prices, was up 1.7% compared to a year earlier, even though gasoline prices fell 4.3% over the same period.

Food prices rose 2.7% over the course of the last 12 months, with a one-month jump of 0.2% in June. The average price of a gallon of regular gas was $3.33 at the end of June, according to AAA, down from $3.62 at the end of May. The CPI report showed a 2% drop in gas prices in June alone.