TEMPTOS

The call came as William Dunkelberg watched the sci-fi thriller Surrogates at a Plymouth Meeting theater. Katie Couric of CBS Evening News would like him on the national broadcast.

With the nation’s unemployment rate stubbornly hanging around 10 percent, President Obama was proposing that the U.S. Small Business Administration ease credit terms to boost lending and the job market.

What about it? What did Dunkelberg think? Oh, and would he tape via video link from Philadelphia for CBS the same day as Obama’s announcement?

Less than 1 percent of the millions of small businesses in the United States have a government loan of any kind, Dunkelberg said in his cramped professor’s office at Temple University as he prepared last month for the Couric interview.

“There’s no evidence in my data of a credit freeze on Main Street,” Dunkelberg said. “They can borrow money. They have no customers, and that’s the bummer.” The best plan, he believed, was for the government to somehow give people money to spend at local stores.

When small business seeks to influence the makers of economic policy in Washington, many times they do it through 66-year-old Dunkelberg, a self-described “sci-fi guy” and Jimmy Buffett fan.

This former dean of the Temple business school is not as loud and zany as Mad Money’s Jim Cramer, nor as pervasive as Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. But he has gained an avid following among hundreds of economists and policymakers for his insight into small businesses through 36 years of relentlessly surveying companies with 10 or 20 employees. He talks with investment professionals and hundreds of small-town bankers each year. He even is chairman of a small-town bank, Liberty Bell Bank of Marlton.

New York experts plug into Wall Street. Washington plugs into the White House. Dunkelberg says he believes that he is plugged into Main Street Philadelphia and that his phone number is on the speed dial of financial reporters seeking plainspoken, and sometimes contrarian, views on the recession.

The big question: Where are the jobs? By now small-company owners would be hiring in anticipation of the next boom.

But in May, about 18 months into the current recession, small businesses that responded to a Dunkelberg survey had eliminated an all-time high of more than 1 employee per firm – or the equivalent of 500,000 workers among the 400,000 member firms in the National Federation of Independent Business. “The jobs come from the little firms; and when they don’t hire, the national job numbers won’t look good,” Dunkelberg said.

Dunkelberg does not have a hopeful story to tell on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, MSNBC. Through September, small-business respondents were still reporting that, on average, they were still cutting employment.

A week after his Couric interview, a frightening Dunkelberg chart on small-business job cuts appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

“Anecdotes are a dime a dozen. Everybody has anecdotes. The Chamber of Commerce has anecdotes,” said John Silvia, the chief economist with Wells Fargo & Co. Dunkelberg’s surveys track small businesses through recessions and growth periods and consistent data, Silvia said, “is everything in economics.”

Dunkelberg’s fascination with small business began in the early 1970s.

The National Federation of Independent Business approached him with a problem. The group was formed in the 1940s an an alternative to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which was dominated by big corporations.

NFIB found it had a large and diverse membership, but the group was not being heard in Washington. Dunkelberg, then an economics professor at Stanford University, recalled telling them: “Facts win. B.S. loses.”

He had crunched numbers for the University of Michigan consumer-sentiment surveys as a graduate student. People understood the surveys. The results were quoted in newspapers. They showed trends. They were considered facts. With its own survey, small business could speak with one voice.

Dunkelberg’s first surveys for the federation asked about the minimum wage. Respondents said they would cut jobs to maintain profit margins if forced to pay more for labor. Congress eventually raised the wage. “But we got our two cents into the debate, and we got some press, and we made it harder for them to railroad us,” Dunkelberg said.

He expanded the surveys in 1973 to ask questions on capital spending, optimism, credit, hiring, and sales. First he surveyed quarterly; then monthly.

Dunkelberg had something. He saw the 1979 recession coming in the results of the small-business survey, although the federation told him to soften his news release. Today, Dunkelberg releases survey results the second Tuesday of each month on cable-TV channel CNBC.

As Dunkelberg spoke for this interview, a Reuters financial reporter called twice on his cell phone – which rings to the tune of Buffett’s “Margaritaville” – for the most recent survey results.

Dunkelberg said he believed banks could lend. He was not concerned about a credit freeze. In fact, he was concerned about the potential for easy money flowing into the economy when consumer confidence returned because the Federal Reserve flooded the financial system with cash in 2008 and early 2009.

He extracts from his wallet a crisp and expired $100 billion Zimbabwean bill. “It buys nothing,” he said, noting that this was what happens when a currency suffers hyperinflation.