A new Bloomberg Businessweek article suggests how a few small community banks are perhaps giving a bad wrap to the “banks aren’t lending” mantra. It seems like a case of the survival of the fittest played out in the business world. The article suggests a drop in small-business lending can be traced to a small number of weak community banks that are “really pulling down the total” for such loans, says Elizabeth Laderman, an economist who authored an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Weak banks made up about one-third of the 5,453 banks with less than $1 billion in assets that were reviewed, she says. Read more