Banks across the US imposed stricter terms on all sorts of lending from home mortgages to credit cards as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of 1930s took its toll on the economy.

On Monday, the Federal Reserve said that its latest quarterly survey of bank lending practices showed an increasing number of banks tightening credit norms across a wide range of loan products. As many as 60% of the banks surveyed reported that they had enforced stricter lending standards on credit card debt while 65% of them said they had imposed tougher conditions for other types of consumer loans.

However the biggest impact of tighter lending norms was felt on various types of business loans with more than 85% banks reporting that they had imposes stricter conditions for “commercial and business” loans. Almost all banks surveyed – the figure going up to 95% – reported tougher standards for the lines of credit generally extended to large and medium-sized businesses.

The Federal Reserve conducted the survey over the first two weeks of October which would have been too early to show the impact of a series of bank bail-out measures taken by the government so as to ease the credit crunch in the finance markets and jumpstart the lending process.