ST. LOUIS – Michael Chapman, the owner of a building company with 20 employees in Santa Fe, N.M., has had trouble getting a bank loan, and this month he let Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Thomas Hoenig know it.

Tight credit in commercial real estate “has really made it impossible for banks to lend to people like me,” the president of Chapman Homes said during a question period after an April 7 speech by Hoenig.

Chapman said his company, unable to get a loan to hire 15 workers while big Wall Street firms get record bailouts, is “too small to succeed.”

Owners of small businesses across the country are telling Fed officials they would expand and hire more workers if only they could get financing.

Policymakers at the end of a two-day meeting starting today may cite scant lending as a drag on demand as they affirm a pledge to keep interest rates low for an “extended period.”

“It’s going to be a slow recovery to the extent it depends on banks opening up their lending,” said William Ford, a former Atlanta Fed president now at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. “Lenders have gone to the extreme of being very tight, very cautious, as they recover from serious earnings problems.”

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The Federal Open Market Committee is scheduled to issue a statement Wednesday.

Confidence among small businesses fell in March to the lowest level since July 2009 as executives grew more concerned about earnings, the National Federation of Independent Business reported April 13.

More borrowers reported credit hard to get, and good borrowers saw little reason to expand borrowing, said William Dunkelberg, the group’s chief economist.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said in an April 7 speech that while a U.S. economic recovery is under way, “we are far from being out of the woods,” in part because of tight credit.

“Bank lending remains very weak, threatening the ability of small businesses to finance expansion and new hiring,” he told the Dallas Regional Chamber.

Commercial and industrial loans at commercial banks declined by $900 million to $1.27 trillion during the week ending April 14, according to Fed data released Friday.

Revolving debt, such as credit cards, which are often used to finance small businesses, fell by $9.4 billion in February, the biggest decline in three months, according to the Fed.

The shortage of credit for small businesses will probably slow a decline in the U.S. unemployment rate, which fell to 9.7 percent in March from 10.1 percent in October.

 


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