ycle. Banks lend to companies,cheap toms shoes, which spend to open factories to create widgets. Plants mean jobs, which leads to more money in people's pockets to spend. It re-energizes the economy,cheap toms. Small and midsize businesses depend on bank loans to grow far more than large corporations, which can pay for their plans by selling bonds or stock in the financial markets. In February, H.J. Heinz Co., the giant food company best known for its ketchup, raised $300 million by selling five-year bonds at an interest rate of just 1.5 percent. IBM,toms outlet, Procter Gamble and McDonald's have all raised hundreds of millions of dollars recently by selling bonds and paying record-low interest rates. Small and midsize businesses blamed banks for making matters worse when the recession struck by pulling back credit dramatically, and for not helping during the economic recovery by making credit freely available. For their part, banks say regulations passed since the financial crisis have made it difficult for them to lend because they have to set more cash aside to cushion themselves against future losses. On a bank's books, a line of credit that a business can tap as needed counts the same as a traditional, lump-sum loan. While they don't break out the numbers, banks say businesses are opening lines of credit but skittish about drawing on them. In conference calls with analysts and reporters, bank executives have said recently that what they call the loan utilization rate, the percentage of available credit that businesses use, is unusually low. They do not release that number. Your comment will be posted immediately, unless it is spam or contains profanity. For more information, please see our Comments FAQ. An insider's guide to politics and policy, available on the iPad or as a PDF download.
By DANIEL WOOLLS, Associated Press MADRID (AP) Freedom of information in Spain came one step nearer Friday after the recently-elected government agreed to introduce a bill in response to widespread disgust over corruption and mismanagement by elected officials of both main political parties. The country's Cabinet agreed to put forward legislation that will allow Spaniards to find out more about how their money is spent by government. Spain, which is struggling to get its public finances under control, is one of Europe's few countries without wide-ranging freedom of information legislation. "It is a law whose main goal is improve the credibility of and trust in our institutions, especially government ones,http://bbs.chrbank.cn/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=1596679," Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria said. The legislation will take months to come into effect, after an unprecedented 15-day period in which the general public can make suggestions on what should be accessible to them and how the law should work. After that,http://8127.china720.cn/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=969617&extra=, the bill has to be go through normal Parliamentary procedures. Though the salaries of the prime minister and government ministers are already public information, as are the national budget and much other money-related data, not all of it is easy to access. But under the new bill,http://atlblogs.com/rptut/archives/2003/11/germans-love-hasselhoff-but-brits-hate-titanic.html#comments,