How long do you think the 90 percent guarantee and fee reductions will need to be in place? When will the economy be strong enough that these enhancements won't be needed?

We believe that there's still gaps out there and that we have to be really aggressive in closing those gaps in terms of access to capital by delivering a program that helps banks take on this risk.

I left out one other part of the president's plan, though. I told you that banks weren't lending for two reasons. One is they had the capital but didn't want to take on the risk. The second is they don't have the capital. That's where the $30 billion Small Business Lending Fund comes in.

It doesn't cost $30 billion. When you put capital out to banks, they're going to repay most of it. We're going to charge a fee—we'll have a dividend rate of 5 percent and as low as 1 percent if they increase their small-business lending. It's very attractive to small banks to get capital at 1 percent.

If they get the money at 1 percent, they might very well not put out just $30 billion—banks leverage their capital—they might put out $90 billion.

That's a pretty effective use of capital. We know we need to take it and put it in a separate fund that has no relation to the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Community banks are interested in capital and are interested in serving their small businesses with that capital. The rates that have been described could be pretty interesting at the low end. We are hopeful that we can have a two-pronged approach to closing this gap.

If you're a bank that doesn't have capital, there's the $30 billion. A lot of banks actually have plenty of capital. They don't want to get too far out there in terms of being concerned that the regulators will worry about them.

So the SBA can help them by allowing them to make loans where they only have to put 10 percent on their books, and they can fund the other 90 percent or they can sell it on the secondary market and make some more loans.

So we think those programs go together kind of hand in glove. This is a very intentional package. Each of the pieces address an identifiable part of the credit gap that we have seen.

The Small Business Lending Fund relies on reprogramming unused TARP money. A lot of people in Congress don't want any new uses for TARP, they just want to end the program. Politically, how do you get this done?

There's a lot of support for capital in community banks. People have to understand the actual cost of the program is not $30 billion.

The source of the money is really not a relevant piece of the puzzle. The most relevant piece of the puzzle is how do you get the money into the banks that are lacking capital and give enough of a carrot that we get it out into the hands of small businesses.

The source of it could be something else, because it's probably not a very big cost.

It's probably a pretty good use of taxpayers' money to take a few billion dollars and turn it into maybe as much as $90 billion.