As CNN Money's Catherine Clifford reports, small business owners are still waiting for a thaw in credit, and big banks do not appear to be moving in the right direction:

Eleven top TARP recipients -- including Wells Fargo, by far the nation's largest lender to small companies -- cut their collective small business loan balance by more than $2.3 billion in December, according to a Treasury report released late Tuesday.

The drop marked the eighth consecutive month of declines for the 11 banks. In that time, their total loan balance has fallen 7%, to $169.4 billion. Seven of the reporting banks have cut their small business loan balance every single month.

Read The lending crunch: 'It is very hard to survive' here.

So it isn't any wonder that optimism among small business owners continues to be low.  The National Federation of Independent Business Optimism Index is now at 89.3.  That's up from last year's low of 81.0 in March, but continues to indicate, as NFIB economists William C. Dunkelberg and Holly Wade write, that "small business owners entered 2010 the same way they left 2009 – depressed.   Here's the Optimism Index trending since 1975:

Read the NFIB report here.