Credit conditions and economic growth: Recent evidence from US banks

•Growth of post-crisis US bank lending has been dismal.•We apply a new technique to parse the supply and demand of bank loan flows.•The results imply fairly robust loan demand and lackluster supply in recent years.•As such, loan supply appears to have exerted a notable drag on economic activity.

What explains the slow recovery of US bank lending since the financial crisis? We apply a new technique to disentangle loan supply and demand shocks. Lackluster supply in recent years played a key role against the backdrop of recovering demand.