For more than a year now, mortgage lenders have been tightening their lending standards. Second mortgages and other types of home equity lending have seen tightening as well. It is no surprise, then, that consumer lending — credit cards and the like — are seeing increasingly tight lending standards as well.

Here is what the Federal Reserve reports about consumer lending:

About 65 percent of domestic banks—up notably from about 30 percent in
the April survey—indicated that they had tightened their lending
standards on credit card loans over the past three months, and about
the same fraction of respondents—up from roughly 45 percent in the
April survey—reported having tightened standards on consumer loans
other than credit card loans.

While this may make it harder for some to get credit, this is ultimately a good thing. After all, if lenders had been more discriminating to begin with, some of this wouldn’t have happened.