youngstown business journal

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Forget 'What are your strengths and weaknesses?' If you want to get the real dope on prospective employees, ask job candidates these seven questions.

Jo-Ann Stores is posting impressive sales and earnings numbers and is an example of a retail sector on which Walmart doesn't have a steel grip.

Hang onto this essential checklist, so you’ll know what to do when the time comes.

Plain Dealer fileSigns of life: Tower City Center is getting new stores and a restaurant.

Tower City Center has signed two stores and a restaurant to move into vacant spaces at the downtown Cleveland mall next month.

Ted Crow/The Plain Dealer

The Great Recession

Read more: Credit crunch makes it tough for business to borrow money.

Chad and Rachel Lewis bought their Akron-area home in 2007 for $130,000, with a 7 percent mortgage. But when they decided to refinance last month, they wondered about the credit storm everyone was talking about. Would they even qualify for a new loan?

Two weeks later, they were approved. They got a 4.95 percent mortgage, and they're saving $150 a month.

The Lewises' story is one you don't often hear over the buzz about a credit crisis and consumers who can't get loans for homes, cars and college.

The truth is, major banks are indeed lending. But many people are afraid to borrow in this economy, and lending standards common years ago have returned: Banks demand down payments on homes and cars, require decent credit scores and insist on proof of income.

A third reality: Lending by businesses that aren't banks - such as mortgage brokers and finance companies - has shriveled.

Although some consumers were left with nowhere to turn, banks have actually increased lending to consumers by 6 percent since early September, when the credit crunch started, according to the Federal Reserve.

KeyCorp Chairman and Chief Executive Henry Meyer speaks for many banks when he lashes out: "We make money by lending money. To say we're not lending would be putting up a 'for sale' sign. To not lend money would be crazy."

The Cleveland bank wrote $5.7 billion in new loans in the fourth quarter to individuals and small and mid-sized businesses. The bank's total loan portfolio as of Dec. 31 was virtually the same as three months earlier, at nearly $77 billion.

Financial policy expert John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., said there are some "patchy spots" in the lending world. "Certainly in some areas, lending is tighter than it sh