The article explores how different banks respond to changes in monetary policy in the United States. By using a new method to identify these policy changes, the researchers found that bank lending is influenced more by expected economic conditions than by actual interest rate changes. This means that previous studies may have mixed up the effects of monetary policy with other factors. The findings also show that the sensitivity of U.S. states to policy changes can vary greatly, leading to a different ranking of states based on their credit behavior. The researchers also expanded on a previous method to analyze a larger set of data from U.S. banks.