I don’t often write about government policies that I like. It’s not that I’m crabby; it’s because they are so scarce. But today I will make an exception. Today, the Fed and the Treasury, along with several other financial regulators, correctly identified the cause of the small business lending problem–themselves–and took steps to fix it. It’s about time.

Today the financial regulators passed the grown man test by “manning up” to what we have known all along; banks have been effectively redlining loans to small businesses due to fears of regulatory reprisal. You can read the statement by clicking here.

They have made a start at addressing the problem by instructing banks to look at the health of the borrower, rather than computer models, when assessing loans. And they have gone on record that banks who do their homework and make loans to healthy small businesses will not be subject to criticism from the regulators.

The purpose of the directive is “to ensure that supervisory policies and actions do not inadvertently curtail the availability of credit to sound small business borrowers.”

As you can see from the chart above showing bank lending to business borrowers. it would have been helpful if they had started ensuring that this wouldn’t happen 15 months ago when banks slammed their doors shut for business borrowers. But let’s not quibble. I’m happy they are taking action now.

Longtime readers will know that I believe non-price credit rationing to be the principal trigger for downturns in employment. It happens when regulators get over-zealous and lay their heavy hands on lending standards. I called it a credit crunch in a series of articles I wrote for the Wall Street Journal in the early 1990’s and again in 2001, which prompted a vicious response from the then Comptroller of the Currency, who denied it ever happens. The fact is, business customers don’t decide how much money to borrow based upon the interest rate; it’s the availability of credit that matters.

This time around, non-price credit rationing has fallen especially hard on small businesses–the source of almost all new jobs. In the dotcom bust, only 15% of the drop in loans hit small businesses. This time it is almost half.

The facts are simple. Employment can’t increase until small businesses can borrow the money to meet payroll. Today’s step just might be a nudge to make that happen.

Bravo to the regulators for taking steps to fix the problem they created in the first place. Now it’s time for banks, large and small, to respond to this statement by giving small business owners the loans they need to do what they always do best–make more jobs for people who want to work.

JR

The new U.S. Financial Data report out today from the St. Louis Fed shows that bank loans to business are still falling. This fits what we hear from entrepreneurs, that large banks have been systematically reducing availability of working capital loans for small companies—likely an unintended consequence of the Treasury bailout programs that make it bad business to make any loans that are not salable to the government.

The chart above shows that the lion’s share of the more than $100 billion (left scale) cut in total bank business loans since last fall is attributable to large banks (right scale). Small banks that do not have full access to the Treasury programs are still making loans.

Banks lend money to small companies, not big ones. Job gains (and losses) come from small companies, not big ones. That’s why this chart tells us we are going to see another lousy job report next week. I think we still have several months of job losses ahead of us before employment turns up again.

JR