The Federal Reserve and other regulators said on Tuesday the credit quality of large loans that US and foreign banks and nonbanks were committed to make in 2010 was still weak but not as bad as in 2009. The Fed and three other regulators reached that conclusion in their annual Shared National Credits Review for 2010. It looks at loans and formal loan commitments as well as any asset such as real estate, stocks and bonds taken as debts previously contracted by supervised institutions and shared by three or more of them.
The review said that total shared commitments fell $362 billion to $2.5 trillion in 2010 and that total shared loans outstanding were down $352 billion to $1.2 trillion. A loan commitment is the obligation of a lender to make loans or issue letters of credit according to terms of a formal loan agreement.