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Fed: Banks Keep Lending Standards Unchanged, Loan Demand Weakens Further

By Anonymous

From the Fed: The April 2010 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices

The April survey indicated that most banks kept their lending standards unchanged in the first quarter, but that moderate net fractions of banks further tightened many terms on loans to businesses and households. ... The survey also indicated that loan demand generally weakened further.
emphasis added

In general banks have stopped tightening lending standards, however demand continues to weaken. For commercial real estate, the banks are still tightening standards:

A significant number of domestic banks, on balance, continued to report having tightened standards on CRE loans. However, this net fraction was considerably smaller than in the January survey. As in the previous survey, domestic banks reported weaker demand for CRE loans, on net.

And on a special question regarding the the use of CRE loan extensions:

In response to a special question, sizable fractions of both domestic and foreign respondents reported having increased their use of CRE loan extensions over the previous six months.

This is similar to the last survey in January ... generally banks have ceased tightening lending standards (this is probably as tight as it gets for this cycle), but loan demand weakened further.

Full post as published by Calculated Risk on May 03, 2010 (boomark / email).