BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Looking back to 2009, a Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation longitudinal study of small businesses that were founded in 2004 and tracked since then found that 89 percent of the surviving firms that were denied loans in that year felt that banks’ heightened requirements played a role in their denials.6 Among the small businesses that were tracked, 21 percent had chosen not to apply for loans for fear of being denied credit, and 5 percent also refrained from seeking external equity financing for fear of being denied such financing.
So it seems that perceptions of credit tightness may lead some small business owners to decide not even to try to obtain additional funding. At this time, however, the net percentage of survey respondents telling the NFIB that they expect credit conditions to become tighter over the next three months has come down considerably from what small business owners reported during 2009.