银行信贷标准[文献翻译].docVIP

原文 Bank Credit Standards By Mitchell Berlin Bankers and the business press often speak of cycles in bank credit standards, periods in which banks’ lending standards are too lax, followed by periods in which standards are too stringent. In this view, bank lending policies tend to amplify fluctuations in GDP；easy money during the upturn sows the seeds of tight money episodes in the downturn. But this pattern is also consistent with variations in bank lending driven by changes in borrowers’ default risk over the business cycle or changes in the demand for loans, which rises and falls with GDP. To make sense of the idea of a lending cycle, we must uncover a systematic reason for banks to make unprofitable loans in an upturn and to forgot profitable loans in a downturn. I emphasize that the tendency must be systematic to distinguish the idea of a credit cycle from the truism that loans made near the peak of an expansion are more likely to go bad simply because bankers (just like economists and other businessmen) have difficulties predicting downturns. What is the evidence for an independent effect for changing bank lending standards — that is, a systematic reason why banks might be too lax or too stringent? And what factors might explain this type of behavior? Economists have proposed a number of plausible models of a bank lending cycle, emphasizing changes in bank capital, competition, or herding behavior. To date, only the channel relating changes in bank capital to lending standards has firm empirical support.The available evidence is too weak to give us much confidence in assigning an important role for other theories of bank lending standards. WHAT ARE CREDIT STANDARDS? It is helpful to be a little clearer about what we mean by a change in bank credit standards. Let’s begin with a straightforward prescription from investment theory: A profitmaximizing bank should make any loan with a positive net present value (NPV). The NPV of a loan