In testimony on February 3, 1992 before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the United States Senate, Richard F. Syron, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, proposed a mechanism to help relieve current credit availability problems by making existing FDIC...

The degree to which mid-sized firms--the "middle market"- depend on large regional banks for short-term credit is an issue particularly relevant to New England. If this dependence is heavy, then the recent consolidation among the region’s large bank holding companies could be forcing its...

To improve our understanding of the role of banks in the transmission of monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston convened a conference in June of 1995 to consider the question, "Is Bank Lending Important for the Transmission of Monetary Policy?" That banks are an important element in...

This article examines how consolidation, along with the use of credit-scoring models for lending, may be reflected in recent patterns of small business lending by banks. The authors find that the market for small business lending has been substantially influenced both by the wave of bank...

Loan syndication, where a group of banks makes a loan jointly to a single borrower, offers several benefits. Syndication allows banks to diversify, expanding their lending to broader geographic areas and industries. Second, syndication allows banks that are constrained by their capital-asset...

The New England banking industry experienced serious problems between 1989 and 1992. As the region's economy deteriorated, banks failed at an unprecedented rate and many others barely survived. Banking problems were widespread, but they were not uniform. The ratio of nonperforming loans to total...