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On Monday, President Obama announced a plan to unfreeze capital for small businesses (see here). With the potential of creating new jobs and helping the country move out of the recession, the White House offered several actions to help small businesses obtain the capital that they need. The financial crisis has taken a devastating toll on entrepreneurs as capital has become increasingly scarce. This year’s projections for loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration are down to $10 billion, which is half the amount of loans guaranteed last year.

To get capital flowing again for small businesses, the President’s plan calls for purchasing securities backed by SBA loans, reducing lending fees, increasing loan guarantees, and easing the tax burden. To increase confidence among banks to lend to entrepreneurs in current economic conditions, the White House will temporarily raise guarantees on loans to 90 percent in SBA 7(a) Loan Program. Currently, the government guarantees on small business loans made by private lenders are either 85 percent for loans under $150,000 or 75 percent for larger loans. The temporary reduction will provide some needed confidence to a shaky banking sector. Although the findings from research on SBA’s loan programs are mixed, with critics noting that making credit too easily available sets up many small businesses for failure and wastes money, a temporary increase may be what we need right now to regain reasonable levels of access to credit. Many entrepreneurs who own otherwise successful and efficiently-run businesses may go under because they cannot pay the rent or meet payroll in this historically deep downturn. In an extensive research project of mine using confidential Census data, I find that access to capital is the most important factor predicting whether small businesses will survive or fail.

President Obama also plans to substantially reduce and ultimately eliminate capital gain taxes on investments made in small businesses. The current plan is to exclude 75 percent of capital gains for investors in small businesses who hold their investments for at least five years. The reduction or elimination of these taxes will increase the effective return from investing in small businesses. Although many investors, understandably, will continue to be wary of putting their money into small businesses in these economic conditions, reducing capital gains taxes could inject some much-needed capital into the small business sector because of the current lack of attractive alternatives.

In my research I have found that the most common source of capital among small business owners is their own or family savings. But, with incomes falling, the stock market down, and housing equity drying up, entrepreneurs will increasingly need to seek out alternative sources of capital, such as banks, credit unions and angel investors.

These are desperate times and they call for quick and bold actions by the federal government to help what many consider to be the life-blood of the U.S. economy — small businesses. Maintaining adequate access to financial capital for the nation’s nearly 13 million business owners should be viewed as one of the most important goals of the economic stimulus plan.

Best Buy (BBY), the largest consumer electronics retailer, posted better-than-expected quarterly earnings as its long-time rival Circuit City frittered away in bankruptcy.

Net earnings were $570 million, or $1.35 per share, down 23 percent compared with $737 million, or $1.71 per share, the previous year, the Richfield, Minn.-based company said in a statement. Excluding one-time items, earnings were $682 million, or $1.61 per share, a decrease of 6 percent from a year earlier.

Steve Waldman puts his finger on the mission-creep problem at the FDIC:

It’s as if an insurance company that ordinarily refuses to cover homes in hurricane states suddenly offered policies only to purchasers looking to build homes on Gulf-coast barrier islands.

Waldman in general does a great job at explaining how the FDIC’s new insurance is an entirely different animal from its old insurance — for one thing, entire banks don’t need to go bust before it kicks in. The FDIC was good at its old job. But that’s no reason to believe it’ll be good at its new one, too.

On Thursday, Alpha Media Group announced that it was closing Blender magazine. The periodical, which specialized in music reviews, employed thirty people. Some will be moving to Maxim and other Alpha publications.

To a certain extent, it isn’t all that surprising to hear that Blender is closing. Amid tales of tanking newspapers and plummeting periodicals, the failure of yet another magazine is hardly noteworthy. Beyond that, I often hear my wife, a Blender subscriber, snarling at the magazine as she reads its reviews; I have to assume that any publication that regularly antagonizes its core audience has a questionable future.

There’s a big gap between the amount of money that the government needs to bail out the banking system, on the one hand, and the rapidly-dwindling amount of TARP funds that it has available for that purpose, on the other. Hence all the leverage in the bank-bailout scheme. But doesn’t it then make perfect sense for all the banks which got unleveraged TARP money back in October to give it back as soon as possible, so that it can then get levered up by the PPIPs and reinjected in beefed-up form back into the financial sector?

Rick Newman, for one, thinks so. But even he is alive to the downside, as explained by Andrew Ross Sorkin:

If Goldman succeeds in returning our money, it could put pressure on other banks to give their money back, too, lest they appear weak…
The problem now is that many of them may still need the money. And yet they may try to follow Goldman’s lead.

Newman reckons that if a bunch of insolvent banks will fail upon trying to give back their TARP money, so much the better:

It’s time to identify the weakest banks and let them fail if they can’t make it on their own. Capitalism isn’t like an elementary-school soccer game, where nobody keeps score and everybody wins just by participating. It’s a Darwinian ecosystem where the threat of extinction forces organizations to adapt and make smart decisions in order to survive.

The problem is that bank failures have systemic consequences. Newman is alive to the problems associated with another Lehman, but he seems to be oblivious to the problems associated with another WaMu: the US banking system can’t easily afford the cut-off in wholesale funding that would be associated with another large group of senior unsecured bondholders losing substantially all their money.

The prize, here, is to keep the financial system alive. And right now it’s simply too interlinked to be able to cope with a substantial number of bank failures. I think that handing back TARP funds is a good idea — but only insofar as it can be done without endangering the system. Otherwise, it’s a step in entirely the wrong direction.

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