lending

A new report out of the Treasury Department Tuesday confirmed what many lawmakers, housing advocates, small businesses and individual consumers have known all along: That despite hundreds of billions of dollars flowing from Washington to the finance industry, bank lending among recipients of the Troubled Asset Relief Program fell in the last three months of [...]

As the economy continues to sink, the Wall Street Journal today documents an increasingly obvious fact: Most of the big banks that got a total of $148 billion in taxpayer money didn’t use it to make loans. Instead, lending activity at 10 of the 13 banks that received funds under the Troubled Assets Relief Program [...]

The Federal Reserve is considering some aggressive steps to unlock lending, including buying large amounts of unsecured short-term debt, The New York Times says today. That’s the money that companies regularly use to run their everyday operations.
When it seizes up, so does the rest of the economy. And that’s close to what’s happening now.
Now that [...]