'We're saying no to almost everybody,' " Greenblatt recalled"
.... I'm not getting one either!
WHERE DID ALL THOSE BAILOUT BILLIONS GO, BENNY?
"Struggling banks tighten clamps on business loans" by Peter S. Goodman, New York Times News Service | July 28, 2008
Banks struggling to recover from multibillion-dollar losses on real estate are curtailing loans to American businesses, depriving even healthy companies of money for expansion and hiring.
The scarcity of credit has intensified the strains on the economy by withholding capital from many companies, just as joblessness grows and consumers pull back from spending in the face of high gas prices, plummeting home values, and mounting debt.
"The second half of the year is shot," said Michael T. Darda, the chief economist at the trading firm MKM Partners in Greenwich, Conn., who was until recently optimistic that the economy would continue expanding.
Uh-oh!
When Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel Wire Products called the local branch of Wachovia - the same bank that had been aggressively marketing loans to him for years - he was distressed by the response.
"The exact words were, 'We're saying no to almost everybody,' " Greenblatt recalled.
Financial industry executives say tighter credit from banks represents a swing back to a realistic assessment of risk, after years of handing out money with abandon. Those practices produced a mortgage crisis whose losses could reach $1 trillion, by many estimates.
Holy crapper!!!!
The financial system is not going along: As banks hold on to their dollars, mortgage rates are climbing. So are borrowing costs for corporations. Some suggest that the banks, spooked by enormous losses, have replaced a disastrously indiscriminate willingness to hand out money with an equally arbitrary aversion to lend - even on industries that continue to grow.
My view is they are STEALING IT to cover their losses!!!
Greenblatt's company has been enjoying double-digit sales growth. This month, it received the two largest orders in its history, he said. "It was jubilation," he said. "I was doing the Funky Chicken."
Isn't that a dance you do when you are hung, people?
The initial call to Wachovia left him dismayed. Greenblatt eventually got oral approval for the loan, though he was still waiting for the money at the end of last week.
Wachovia, which lost $8.9 billion in the second quarter, declined to discuss the loan. But the bank confirmed that it has been reducing its lending in troubled areas of the economy.
Or to anyone else, for that matter. And why they gotta flat out lie, readers?
