One of the refrains from the last few years has been that "Banks need to write off hundreds of billions of dollars of bad loans so that their balance sheets can be repaired and they can afford to loan money again" and until they started to increase loans, there could be no recovery.
Responses that banks loans always turned after a recovery was well underway:
fell on deaf ears. After all, that was just another "pretty graph."
Well, it appears that bank loans have finally made a bottom. This is the weekly graph of total loans and leases at commercial banks:
For the first time since the economy fell off a cliff in late 2008, total bank loans are at a new 13 week high (the 3/31/10 vertical scrape is due to a change in definitions). This 3 month period is the longest that bank loans have been flat since that time as well.
Commercial and industrial loans made their bottom last year. No guarantees, but it appears that total bank loans have finally made a bottom. Pretty graphs (which are just a convenient way to show data) kick Doomer a** again.
