Too big to swallow

摘要

One of the canards of the credit crisis, trotted out regularly by politicians and pundits, is that banks have stopped lending. It is a charge that bankers vehemently reject and the data largely back them up. It is true that overall flows of credit have fallen steeply. Yet analysis by Oliver Wyman, a consultancy, suggests that net lending by American banks, for example, has contracted by amounts that are broadly in line with previous recessions, when demand for credit naturally diminishes and lending standards inevitably tighten. Indeed the worry of some observers, given that easy credit got us into this mess, is that banks are still lending too much.