These meetings seek to identify existing credit gaps, share promising practices, and highlight regional differences as well as national themes in credit access and technical support for small businesses. The key findings of these small business gatherings will be presented to policymakers later this summer.
Despite the difficulties in the small business lending market, I find reason to be optimistic about small business lending in the near future. Improvements in conditions that depressed lending in 2009 lead me to believe that we will begin to see an increase in bank loans to  2  BIS Review 52/2010  small businesses later this year.