Credit Still in Crisis
The quick summary is that lending practices tightened for every category of loans for the seventh straight quarter (in some categories, tightening has been going on even longer). In most categories, the rate of tightening – the difference between the number of banks who say they have tightened credit and the number who have loosened it – is lower than the peak in the October survey. But this just tells us that the second derivative is positive, which was to be expected, since the October peak was the highest ever recorded in every category, when virtually every bank was tightening credit. The first derivative is still negative, which means it is still getting harder to get a loan across all major categories.