Easy credit may be ending as investors reconsider lending risks
By Tomoeh Murakami Tse and Dina ElBoghdady
NEW YORK — In just a few days, shares of Internet travel company Expedia lost 10 percent of their value and the nation's largest mortgage lender said many Americans with good credit were in danger of losing their houses.
At the
root of those seemingly unrelated events is a single new reality, one that could portend trouble for the broader U.S. economy: The era of cheap money appears to be ending.
Easy credit has been the economy's lifeblood in recent years. It gave people who previously couldn't afford houses a crack at the American dream. It fueled multibillion-dollar takeovers of some of corporate America's biggest names. It buoyed the stock market and propped up the prices of many other assets.
But now,
the investors who a few months ago were willing to lend money to Wall Street at low interest rates, on loose terms, are balking as they worry about having to pay the price for lax lending standards. Read more.........
Source:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories.nsf/0
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