Not that I want to beat you over the head but I do want to make sure you "get" my point for the week.

So, in the spirit of being emphatic, let's take a look at a set of ideas.

Banks, for the most part, don't want to make commercial loans to microbusinesses. They consider microbusinesses to be "too risky."

Many of these same banks did not consider overpriced, securitized sub-prime mortgages to be quite so risky.

Certain government officials and certain bank managers do not want to engage in any form of microcredit. It has been shown that microcredit works when the financial institutions or non-profits involved provide technical assistance to the business borrowers. But that technical assistance costs money; the banks don't want to make the investment because, they say, they can't make money that way.

Many of those same banks thought they could make money from said overpriced, securitized sub-prime mortgages.

Meanwhile, banks and other financial institutions that do make loans to microbusinesses are, for the most part, in pretty good shape right now. They make investments in their microbusiness borrowers instead of in questionable loan securities. They offer the needed support and, yet, they still manage to make money.

To this day, many public officials believe that the government should withdraw its support from microcredit programs or should at least arrange for them to be less costly. That, they consider, is the only way to make the programs work for the banks.

Few of them seem especially concerned with the issue of making the programs work for the microbusinesses.

And that shows in the numbers. SBA small business loan guarantees account for 40% of overall small business lending. Yet microbusiness owners (and again, I remind you, they are 91% of all U.S. firms) say they can't get an SBA-backed loan.

I expect there is some very good reason why overpriced, securitized sub-prime mortgages seemed like a good investment to all those banks, while microbusinesses didn't — and still don't.

Offhand, I can't imagine what that reason might be but I'm sure there is one.