Chief financial officers are an optimistic group these days.

While a slew of recent economic indicators seem to point to a slower growing economy, 90 percent of the finance executives are confident about their companies third quarter growth, according to the latest quarterly survey by Robert Half. What's more, 43 percent say they are very confident.

Here is yet another reminder that job growth will continue to be slow for a period of time.

A survey by Robert Half found that an equal percentage of chief financial officers expect to boost hiring full-time accounting and finance professionals as those who plan to reduce their job ranks.

Employers beware: Your accounting and finance employees are becoming restless.

A growing number are confident about their job security and plan to look for a new job. These are among the findings from the latest quarterly survey commissioned by The Mergis Group, a professional placement division of SFN Group.

Two new programs out from the Small Business Administration (SBA) promise easier loan access for US companies, which is good news for the many small firms that have struggled to get funding from banks over the past few years.

The first program is called Small Loan Advantage, and its main goal is to reduce the paperwork involved in getting loan approval and decrease the wait-time from application to money receipt.

Venture capital investment may be declining, but not for start-ups. Early stage financings continue to hold the imagination of VC investors, according to a new report out by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

The report provides an update on venture capital investing in the third quarter of the year, and put investment activity at $4.8 billion in VC dollars spent on 780 deals over the quarter. This is a pretty significant decline from the previous quarter, which saw $6.9 billion spent on 962 deals.

With US M&A still going strong both domestically and internationally, bias inherent in traditional valuation methods can lead to incorrect assumptions. Hence it is time to take a new approach to valuation. Or so say the authors of a new M&A methodology out in the Harvard Business Review.

Alexander van Putten— principal at Cameron & Associates and affiliate faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School— Mehrdad Baghai—managing director of boutique advisory firm Alchemy Growth Partners—and Ian MacMillan—principal at Cameron & Associates and Ambani Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Wharton—have come up with a twist on traditional methods for valuing a potential acquisition target that they say reduces false positives in the M&A process.

It may not be as sexy as the latest iPhone or iPad apps, but Google is reaching out to small businesses with a new range of finance and management apps geared specifically at SMEs, and have promised to launch new small company tools each Tuesday.

In its first release, companies can take advantage of accounting and finance app Outright, which provides automated data gathering from various external sources, such as banks and payments service providers, like Paypal.

Potential changes to aircraft export credit rules worldwide, under a review by the OECD, could have a big impact on smaller air carriers, according to some airline industry executives. However, others say that changes must be made for a truly competitive landscape to exist.

The review, by the OECD’s aviation working group, Participants to the Sector Understanding on Export Credits for Civil Aircraft (the ASU), will be completed by year-end—after having its final industry consultation in November.

A recent piece of research by academics Nils Backhaus and Luc Soenen looking at how to determine if a company is holding excess cash and what the impact is of that, which appears here on AFPOnline, made a very good case for some of the potential pitfalls that companies face when retaining extra cash.

Given the tremendous focus by much of the US business sector on stockpiling cash in recent years, understanding not just the benefits, but also the issues that could arise as a result, is an important exercise that should help finance execs to ensure that cash is put to best use.

This will be quite a week for women entrepreneurs. Not only is the first-ever gathering of East coast-West coast women entrepreneurs—and potential start-up investors—happening in Silicon Valley, but there are also events worldwide for women—and men—during Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Such events are critical for encouraging women to seek out financing and partnerships for growing their small businesses or business ideas.