The Big Banks Give Their Thanks
By Marc Tracy
While much of the small-business credit drop of the past year can be, er, credited to falling demand for credit (this economy, after all, is not a splendid time to go into debt if you can avoid it), we have also pointed the blame in part at some of the country's biggest banks (and biggest recipients of federal bailout money), who have permitted less-than-encouraging raw numbers and, even more, a dispirited psychology to coax them against lending very much at all to the nation's small businesses.
And new numbers reveal much the same. If you take the small-business loan balances of the 22 banks that received the most federal bailout money over the past half-year, you can watch a $10.5 billion decline. You can also witness three of those banks make no small-business loans at all. So much for gratitude?
November 17, 2009 9:15 AM
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