音频在线播放：

>>点击下载该音频

And this past week, I called on Congress to increase the maximum size of various SBA loans, so that more small business owners can set up shop and grow their operations.  I also announced that we’ll be taking additional steps through our Financial Stability plan to make more credit available to the small local and community banks that so many small businesses depend on – the banks who know their borrowers, who gave them their first loan and watched them grow.

The goal here is to get credit where it’s needed most – to businesses that support families, sustain communities, and create the jobs that power our economy.  That’s why we enacted the Financial Stability Plan in the first place, back when many of our largest banks were on the verge of collapse; our credit markets were frozen; and it was nearly impossible for ordinary people to get loans to buy a car or home or pay for college.  The idea was to jumpstart lending and keep our economy from spiraling into a depression.  Fortunately, it worked.  Thanks to the American taxpayers, we’ve now achieved the stability we need to get our economy moving forward again.

But while credit may be more available for large businesses, too many small business owners are still struggling to get the credit they need.  These are the very taxpayers who stood by America’s banks in a crisis – and now it’s time for our banks to stand by creditworthy small businesses, and make the loans they need to open their doors, grow their operations, and create new jobs.  It’s time for those banks to fulfill their responsibility to help ensure a wider recovery, a more secure system, and more broadly shared prosperity.  And we’re going to take every appropriate step to encourage them to meet those responsibilities.  Because if it’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that here in America, we rise and fall together.  Our economy as a whole can’t move ahead if small businesses and the middle class continue to fall behind.

This country was built by dreamers.  They’re the workers who took a chance on their desire to be their own boss.  The part-time inventors who became the fulltime entrepreneurs.  The men and women who have helped build the American middle class, keeping alive that most American of ideals – that all things are possible for all people, and we’re limited only by the size of our dreams and our willingness to work for them.  We need to do everything we can to ensure that they can keep taking those risks, acting on those dreams, and building the enterprises that fuel our economy and make us who we are.

Thanks.