摘要：Are banks denying credit to firms and households in Spain? A positive answer to this question seems to be a well installed presumption between analysts and politicians who demand and motivate government intervention in several forms, including direct public finance,publicly loan guarantee schemes and even interest rates subsidization. This paper presents a brief overview of the theoretical and empirical arguments for or against credit rationing and of the Spanish Bank System practices as a previous step to provide new empirical evidence of the commercial bank system practices during and before the current crisis in Spain,analyzing the long-run relationship between loans and deposits. Our results suggest that this relationship is time-varying,which supports the view that a new commercial bank practice emerged a few quarters before the starting of the current crisis leading it,a new phenomenon with negative potential effects over firms and households.
