This is CBS, Eye on the World. I'm John Batch.

The Small Business Report. Gene Marks is here. He's the Small Business columnist for the Guardian newspaper, UK and U.S. edition, and for the hometown newspaper, Philadelphia Inquirer. We're both boys from Keystone State and also other distinguished publications.

Watching the American economy by watching small business.

We begin with, Gene's probably his favorite metric, although, you know, Vegas challenges this.

This is the Architecture Billings metric.

Gene, good evening to you.

Why do you watch Architecture Billings?

Good evening.

Hi, John.

Yeah, well, I do like to follow construction, and I do like to follow the home industry, the real estate industry, because I cover small

businesses and what happens there is a, you know, enormously impacts, you know, small businesses, both

directly and indirectly, depending on the industry is going. The American

Institute of Architects puts out their billings index every month where they survey their members.

They get a bunch of information. They find out where their billings are going. And

unfortunately, they're not going that great right now. It picked up a little bit from last month, but it's still in contraction

zone, which means it's in decline for architectural billings. And that's both on overall

billings and also like the number of design contracts as well. They're just soft right now.

And architects, as you know, John, I mean, people, higher

architects for both commercial and residential purposes. So it's a leading index. And right now,

when I look at what the architects are, the jobs they're working on and the buildings that they're

having, it doesn't, it doesn't portend very well for, you know this country at least over the next four to six months.

So numbers are solved from the architects.

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