Credit conditions for U.S. businesses and households continued tightening in the first months of the year, according to a Federal Reserve survey of bank loan officers, but the results seemed to mark the accumulating impact of Fed monetary tightening rather than the cliff-like decline in credit some feared after the March collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Reuters reported. The Fed's quarterly Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey, or SLOOS, among the first measures of sentiment across the banking sector since the recent run of bank failures, showed that a net 46.0% of banks tightened terms of credit for a key category of business loans for medium and large businesses compared with 44.8% in the prior survey in January - a modest, stepwise change. For small firms, conditions were slightly more stringent, with a net 46.7% of banks saying credit terms were stiffer now versus 43.8% in the last survey. Banks reported that firms of all sizes were showing less demand for credit than three months earlier.
