February 04, 2017
One of the central themes in the Republican drive to repeal Dodd-Frank is the claim that it has made it difficult for businesses to get credit. This assertion is often given the he said/she said treatment, as in this Washington Post piece today. (Actually, it’s often just given the he said treatment, where the assertion is accepted as fact, with the question being whether a reduction in business credit is worth making the banking industry safer.)
There is actually evidence that we can look to in order to assess the ability of businesses to get credit in the Dodd-Frank era. On the one hand we can look at the interest rate on high-yield bonds as being the cost of capital to many mid-size firms that are big enough to get access to the bond market, but still far too risky to qualify as investment grade.
Rates in this market, as well as spreads against Treasury bonds, have been extraordinarily low in recent years. In fact, there were so low that Fed chair Janet Yellen warned against a bubble in this market in the summer of 2014. The other major piece of evidence is the self-assessment of businesses of the problems they face in getting credit.
The National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) has been surveying its members on the problems they face in their business. They explicitly ask about credit conditions. In recent years, this has been a very minor problem and in fact last year hit record lows for the survey.
While all surveys have methodological issues, there is no reason to believe that the NFIB would tilt its findings to make credit look like less of a problem than it actually is. Nor is plausible that credit could be a major problem for a substantial portion of U.S. businesses but not for the businesses included in the NFIB survey.
In short, we do have evidence on the question of Dodd-Frank undermining access to business credit and it is unambiguous, it has not posed a major problem. The claim that Dodd-Frank has prevented businesses from expanding and undermined the recovery is one of those alternative facts that is so popular in political debates these days. It should not be taken seriously.
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