Oct. 5--The television ads pitching no-money-down sales on anything from couches to cars to condominiums now may be as ancient as $2-a-gallon gas.

The era of easy credit appears to be over even after Congress approved a $700 billion rescue plan last week to help ease a growing global credit crisis, according to lending experts.

"Coming out of this crisis, credit is going to be much harder to get and more expensive when you get it," said Charles Hixon, director of the Consumer Credit Counseling Service of the Partnership for Families, Children and Adults in Chattanooga. "I think it is probably a good thing because for so long it's been so easy to get credit that obviously people have been rewarding themselves with things that they don't need and expenses that they can't afford simply because it was easy to get."

Chattanooga lenders insist they still have plenty of money to lend and are eager to make loans. But to get approved for most loans, borrowers will have to put down more of their own money and have better credit records than they did over the past three or four years.

"The old becomes new again," said Mike Butler, city president of SunTrust Bank in Chattanooga. "A lot of mortgage lending had gotten a little loose and lax, so it's certainly different now than it was two or three years ago. But it's not different than it was five or six years ago."

For many consumers, returning to stricter credit requirements of the past means they will get fewer and smaller loans. For lenders, that should mean less chance of a repeat of the hefty financial losses that helped create the current credit crisis.

But because consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, tighter credit means a slowdown in the economy.

U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the former Chattanooga mayor and developer who worked on putting a revised bailout plan together in Congress, told Tennessee business leaders last week that he expects the economy will slip into a recession even with approval of the federal bailout package.

"I think the future is going to be very cloudy," he said. "This is the beginning of many days of reckoning."

driving woes

Bill Camden, finance director at Herb Adcox Chevrolet, said automobile dealers are fighting rising gas prices, a slowing economy and a tightening credit market.

"This is the toughest market I've seen in the 19 years I've been in this business," he said. "Everyone has tightened up on the amount of money they will loan, and our overall volume is down."

Mr.