This is an interesting article about small banking in the US – the US have always had a thing about small banks and there are plenty of them around. A lot of them are trundling right through the crisis. They tend to know their customers better.
This snippet of news from Australia looks like it highlights the same phenomenon.
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank yesterday reported impaired loans of all of $44 million at September 2008 and equal to only 0.1 per cent of gross credit exposures of $33.5 billion at the end of the quarter.