Today, however, Spanish banks especially those most heavily engaged in domestic mortgage lending must pay a much higher spread over interbank rates to secure new funding.

Lending between banks, as well as deposits placed by large corporations, increased spectacularly in the years leading up to the crisis.

But lending would be inhibited even if the banks were healthier.

Consider what happens when banks in Texas, Florida, or California make bad lending decisions that threaten their survival.

The G 7 action plan aims to restore the flow of credit by securing interbank lending, and coordinated central bank actions have provided unprecedented levels of liquidity to the market.

For banks to start lending again, even more intervention may be needed.

Critics point out that plain old bad lending by the commercial banks accounted for 90 of banks losses.

Their consequent reluctance to lend constrains investment.

There are a number of reasons why banks might suddenly stop or slow lending activity.

At the height of the lending frenzy (2004 2006), the study finds that banks loaned even more in response to an examination, and that the outcomes were even worse.

To see why, we need to understand why banks are still so reluctant.

Bank regulation, like lending, was once decentralized and judgment based.

But banks used all their political muscle to stop states from enacting laws to curtail predatory lending.

Regular banks, too, are trying to evade new regulations by ramping up off balance sheet lending.

Many of America s big banks moved out of the lending business and into the moving business.

In Spain, banks have historically issued 30 year mortgages whose interest rates are indexed to interbank rates such as Euribor, with a small spread (often less than 100 basis points) fixed for the lifetime of the mortgage.

Cable appears to believe the banks lobbyists when they claim that lending and growth would suffer if banks were forced to hold more capital.

The car loan market underwent a mini boom in 2003 04, but non repayment rates in excess of 50 forced banks to pull back.

With so many banks in the US fragile, lending is likely to remain constrained.

Both started as NGOs (following the Grameen model) and received millions in grant money from development institutions to start lending operations. They also got access to low cost lending from government banks and multilateral institutions such as the International Finance Corporation (the World Bank s commercial lending arm) and the US Agency for International Development.

But, unfortunately, the most obvious way for banks to increase their capital ratios is to curtail their lending.

The justification was that bailing out the banks, however messily, would enable a resumption of lending.

In fact, it is possible to regard excessive bank lending as a symptom of deeper economic flaws.

But in bad times, when it is important to keep banks lending, bank capital would automatically be increased by the debt to equity conversion.

Governments brought commercial banks under prudential regulation in exchange for public provision of deposit insurance and lender of last resort functions.

As a result, the banks have been focused on returning the bailout funds at the earliest opportunity, rather than using them to boost lending.

In many countries, the fall in bank lending was partly offset by an increase in lending to governments, which thought that the banks should recycle society s savings directly into public sector spending.

Lending, too, is being transformed by technology. Crowdsourced funding and peer to peer lending schemes give borrowers the opportunity to circumvent many of the hurdles of traditional banking including, in some cases, collateral requirements and credit ratings.

By offering to lend freely against collateral, they liquify assets and prevent banks from being forced to unload loans or securities at fire sale prices.

Commercial banks, flush with central banks money, advanced credit for many unsound investment projects, with the explosion of financial innovation (particularly of derivative instruments) fueling the lending frenzy.

The problem is that China has already done a lot to stimulate domestic demand, both through government spending and by directing its banks to lend.

The banks claim that lending remains constrained by a shortage of creditworthy borrowers, owing to the sick economy.

The study finds that CRA lending by larger banks does indeed respond more to a CRA examination.

While it meant that American banks were not hit as hard as they would otherwise, America s bad lending practices have had global effects.

But safer, less indebted banks are better able to continue lending without becoming distressed or needing support.

On the other hand, perhaps banks reluctance to lend reflects a fear of being short of funds if investment opportunities get even better.

Worse still, much of the money flowing into the banks to recapitalize them so that they could resume lending has been flowing out in the form of bonus payments and dividends.

When large banks are unable to play this role, and are forced to retrench, the likelihood of market volatility increases.

So long as European banks remain undercapitalized and overleveraged, a sustainable recovery supported by robust bank lending is unlikely.

Subjecting banks, some of which are still ailing, to new regulation may lead them to curtail lending even more, thereby further weakening the pace of economic recovery.

Lulled into complacency and excess by ample supplies of artificially cheap financing, Irish banks went on a lending binge.

LONDON It is generally agreed that the crisis of 2008 2009 was caused by excessive bank lending, and that the failure to recover adequately from it stems from banks refusal to lend, owing to their broken balance sheets.

The only thing we got wrong was how bad banks lending practices were, how non transparent banks really were, and how inadequate their risk management systems were.

The implication is that emerging markets, while encouraging foreign banks entry, should at the same time strictly regulate such banks local lending practices.

Having been burned by the crisis, banks have tightened their lending standards, and will now be subject to more stringent capital and liquidity requirements.