One reason why the economy still sucks

I was getting ready for work this morning and saw this CNN crawl: "Banks pull another $1 billion from small business lending". Of course, CNN does not continue on with a 2nd sentence explaining the 1st one. They just throw one unrelated thing after another up on the crawl and expect us to figure it out. So I googled it. As it turns out, most of the "big" banks have in fact continued to reduce the amount of money they loan to small businesses. According to the CNN article, it looks like some of their record profits are being used to increase "compensation expenses". That's bankspeak for bonuses and pay increases. The thing that pisses me off is that most of these banks took TARP funds because they were deemed "too big to fail" and went whining to the government. Most have paid back the TARP funds, which was taxpayer money to start with, but now our leaders are using that paid back money to fund other interests. That's like loaning your brother-in-law $100 you couldn't afford to lend and, when he paid you back, you went and bought a boombox because the money was kinda sorta gone already! This kind of stupid shit is going to come back and smack us in the ass if someone in DC doesn't wake up and rein it in. Here's the link to CNN's article: http://tinyurl.com/ycosbs6