President Obama vowed in his State of the Union address to make assisting domestic manufacturers a top priority for his second term.
Health care is the No. 1 concern of small businesses and the status quo is untenable.
Small businesses want things streamlined, and one of the great successes we're having is less paperwork, faster turnaround times.
We were able in the Recovery Act to get a program where we increased our loan guarantees to 90 percent. Because we had that program, a bank wouldn't have to take that much risk.
The 2009 stimulus law got the ball rolling, allowing the agency to reduce and eliminate fees and raise loan guarantees to 90 percent of the total. I knew that we had the opportunity to use S.B.A. products to fill that gap in a rapid manner, as we ended up doing in the Recovery Act.
We really accomplished what we set out to do with the Recovery Act programs, which was to fill the lending gap created by the crisis.
