Stop Oil Speculation

Excessive oil speculation is raising travel costs this holiday season. As you spend Thanksgiving with family and friends, please share with them your concerns about how oil speculation is affecting them. By educating everyone about this important issue, we can increase the likelihood of Congress acting soon before gasoline and heating costs rise any higher. Please ask your family and friends to sign up for e-mail alerts, so they can join our efforts to keep energy prices affordable. The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote sometime in December on H.R. 3795, the Over-the-Counter Derivatives Markets Act of 2009. This legislation will increase transparency, close loopholes and make it more difficult for Wall Street speculators to manipulate energy prices. We need to encourage legislators to vote for this important measure, and to be successful we will need your help. During the week the House of Representatives votes on this bill, we will e-mail you to ask that you contact your member of Congress. This coordinated action by hundreds of thousands of supporters will make a big difference in building support for reform. We recently redesigned our Web site, www.StopOilSpeculationNow.com, to help influence policymakers during this critical time in the legislative process. We encourage you to visit the site and to follow us on Facebook or Twitter to access up-to-date information on this issue. Finally, if you manage a Web site or blog, you can help educate the public about excessive oil speculation by adding one of our Web stickers to your site. We appreciate your continued support. Together, we can help contribute to America's economic recovery. Thank you, The Coalition to Stop Oil Speculation Now Web Sticker Code
Put this interactive Web Sticker on your site.
		To add the sticker to your site simply copy the following HTML to a page on your site. To forward a link to this page to a friend, click on the Tell A Friend link below.
<div><img alt="Take Action Now" src="http://ata.xenophonstaging.com/animated3.gif" width="149" height="100" /></div>

ARC Loans, SBA, Congress

Congress, doled out Major banks, JP Morgan, Citbank, totally failed banks, But when the time came for the Congress to pass a helping hand to small business, it asked that the small business be profitable. So it hard to get loans from Banks, from SBA. Americas answer to Small Business which need help, a gentle forget it.

September 4, 2009, 6:16 pm

The Official A.R.C. Outcry Begins

By Robb Mandelbaum

The frustration that Agenda readers have shared over the Small Business Administration’s A.R.C. loan program (see here and here and here) has finally percolated up to some of those responsible for fashioning it in the first place. On Tuesday, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, held a press conference in North Fort Myers, where, according to the North Fort Myers Neighbor, a weekly paper, he decried the dearth of A.R.C. loans in Florida as “appalling.”

Senator Nelson placed blame first on the banks, which don’t want to make the A.R.C. loans, he said, because they “can make a lot more money by making the small business owner borrow their money on their credit cards.” He also notes that big bailout recipients such as Citibank and Bank of America still aren’t participating. “That’s simply not right,” he said.

Fair enough, to an extent — as we’ve reported elsewhere, banks see too much effort for not enough profit in the program to make the loans. But then Senator Nelson attacked the S.B.A.’s implementation of the program. Its underwriting rules, he said, “are so stringent that very few businesses . . . can qualify. They say they have to be in business for two years but one of those years has got to be profitable. We’re in the middle of a recession — they can’t be profitable.”

Legislators like to kick around the bureaucracy, so Senator Nelson’s comments are not surprising. In this case, however, they are misdirected — he should be pointing his finger at his colleagues who drafted the provision, as well as those who voted for it. (The latter would include, incidentally, Senator Nelson.) It was Congress that insisted eligible business be both “viable” and “experiencing immediate financial hardship,” a practically impossible balancing act in which the S.B.A.’s profitability rule makes pretty good sense.

It was also Congress that capped the loan size at $35,000. Pair that with the strict accountability that lawmakers also demanded of stimulus programs, which is why the S.B.A. rules are so stringent, and you get a loan that is thoroughly unappetizing to banks. One could argue, I suppose, that the S.B.A. has overreacted to the political climate, but you can’t really blame it for that. The S.B.A. is caught in its own untenable balancing act: If it had been too generous with program requirements, instances of fraudulent lending would almost certainly have emerged, and perhaps those instances would have been widespread.

Then Senator Nelson, or one of his enterprising colleagues, would instead be holding a press conference decrying S.B.A. incompetence and calling for heads to roll.