The Federal Reserve just released its latest figures on credit standards and credit demand. The “Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices,” in the words of the Fed, is designed to shed some light on “changes in the standards and terms of the banks’ lending and the state of business and household demand for loans.”

The Q3 2008 survey was conducted in July; 52 domestic banks and 21 foreign banks with operations here in the U.S. responded. The results are reported in terms of “net tightening/loosening.” Specifically, the Fed adds up the percentage of banks that either “tightened considerably” or “tightened somewhat” in a given loan category and nets that out against the percentage of banks that “eased somewhat” or “eased considerably.”On this page, which has historical data, a positive percentage figure means more banks tightened than loosened; a negative percentage figure means more banks loosened than tightened. So what did the latest survey show?

* Residential mortgage credit was tougher to get all around. The Fed began breaking out tigthening/loosening figures for three sub-categories of mortgage — prime, nontraditional, and subprime — in Q2 2007. Some 74% of those surveyed this time around said they are tightening standards on prime mortgages, up from 62.3% in Q2 2008. A net 84.4% of those surveyed said they were cracking down on nontraditional financing, up from 75.6%, and a net 85.7% said they were tightening on subprime loans, up from 77.7% a quarter earlier.

The subprime and prime figures are records. The nontraditional number is just shy of the high (84.6% in Q1 2008). The previous record for the all-mortgage category was 32.7% in Q1 1991. More on Federal Reserve bank officer survey shows standards continue to tighten