The Federal Reserve's quarterly Survey of Terms of Business Lending, which has been conducted for more than twenty years, collects information on interest rates and other characteristics of commercial bank business loans. The survey has been changed from time to time to recognize innovations in bank lending practices and to improve the measurement of the desired information. The most recent changes took effect with the May 1997 survey. The major improvement was the addition of an item measuring loan risk. In addition, the reporting panel, which had been limited to domestically chartered commercial banks was expanded to include a sample of U.S. branches and agencies of foreign banks, which now account for a significant proportion of business lending to U.S. firms. This article discusses the most recent changes made to the survey and presents some information now available from the new items being reported. It also summarizes information about the use of loan risk ratings from consultations conducted with a sample of the survey respondents during the process of planning the revisions to the survey.

Through a comparison of fingermark sweat corrosion of α phase brass in both the U.K. and Iraq, we show how samples from Iraq have improved fingermark corrosion over U.K. samples that require no additional enhancement prior to visualization. Over 50% of Iraqi samples produced fingermark corrosion with full ridge detail compared with 0% from the U.K. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis of the fingermark corrosion products showed that Iraqi samples exhibit more dezincification with the Zn:Cu ratio averaging 1:1.82 compared with 1:3.07 for U.K. samples. Auger spectroscopy showed the presence of both zinc oxide and copper (I) oxide. No copper (II) was observed on the surface of the corroded brass. Opportunities to exploit the optical properties of these thin film oxides to enhance the visualization of fingermark corrosion are considered, and the potential to use fingermark corrosion of metal as a means of visualizing fingerprints in war zones is discussed.

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Several trends in the financial industry over the past decade and a half have potentially threatened the competitiveness of small banks. Among these developments are the numerous mergers that increased the size and scope of large banks and the increased competition from mutual funds and other nonbank financial institutions. This article examines the economic performance of small banks during the 1985-2000 period by focusing on their ability to attract and profitably intermediate insured and uninsured deposits. It finds that the expansion of deposits and assets at small banks, when adjusted to account for the effects of mergers on measured growth, has consistently exceeded the growth at large banks. Moreover, the profitability of small banks has remained high over the period. These indications of strength among small banks as a whole also hold true for subgroups within the small bank sector. Aside from their success in attracting deposits, the key reasons for the generally good performance of small banks in recent years appear to be their ability to earn relatively high rates of return on their loans and an increase in the share of their portfolios devoted to loans.