Consequently, a higher share of SMEs than of large firms said that their profits had deteriorated in the first half of the year. Given the economic situation, it may come as no surprise that a limited share of euro area SMEs (10%) also reported a deterioration in their own capital (the share of large firms reporting a decline was lower). These developments certainly had an impact on the response to applications for bank loans and, more generally, on the availability of bank loans to euro area firms in the first half of 2009. Notwithstanding the deterioration in the economic situation, the majority of SMEs report that they were successful in applying for a bank loan in the first half of 2009 (see Chart 8). This is one of the main findings of the survey. It provides a very useful overall picture of bank loan supply and helps to answer the question of whether SMEs experienced financing constraints in the first half of 2009. In the period under review, 60% of the SMEs that had applied for a bank loan received the full amount they had requested. An additional 17% said they had received at least part of the amount requested, so that 77% of SMEs received either all or part of the requested bank loan. By contrast, 12% of SMEs had their bank loan application rejected. Unfortunately, we are not yet in a position to compare these results over time to assess whether these shares are high or low.
Third, the estimates of the natural level of output at the end of 2022 are much lower than predicted before the pandemic. The current HLW estimates of r-star in the United States are shown in Figure 3. For comparison, the figure also shows estimates using a version of the model that is not adjusted to take into account COVID or outliers and holds the parameter values fixed at estimates using data through the end of 2019. The two sets of estimates are very similar through 2019. They differ sharply during the acute period of the pandemic, however, when the estimates from the unmodified model exhibit large swings due to the presence of sizeable outliers. Interestingly, the two estimates are very close to each other at the end of the sample. That is, the modifications to the model do not interfere with "letting the data speak." A Modest Imprint Based on the new r-star estimates for Canada, the Euro Area, and the United States, we see no signs of a significant reversal of the decline in r-star estimates evident in prior decades.13 In fact, in all three economies, the r-star estimates in 2022 are within twotenths of a percentage point of the corresponding estimate in 2019. The largest differences between model estimates pre- and post-pandemic relate to the level of each economy's potential output. Figure 4 compares the model's measure of the natural level of output based on estimates using data through the fourth quarter of 2019 (the blue line) to current estimates.