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John DuBois, University of New Mexico/Talk Radio News Service

President Barack Obama announced new small businesses lending initiatives Wednesday aimed at helping small businesses receive more credit and create new jobs. The new policies seek to provide smaller banks with access to TARP funds to encourage lending, coupled with an increase on the caps for existing SBA loans.

“To spur lending to small businesses, it’s essential that we make more credit available to the smaller banks and community financial institutions that these businesses depend on,” the President said during an afternoon speech at the Metropolitan Archives in Landover, Maryland. “These are the community banks who know their borrowers; who gave them their first loan; who have watched them grow from down the street, not from Wall Street.”

“If these institutions put forth a plan to increase lending to small businesses, we will help them get the capital they need to do it at rates that are more affordable than the ones offered to our largest financial institutions,” Obama added.