"There is a Credit Crunch"

Tyler Cowen does some digging and concludes:

I still cannot agree with Alex and Bryan: ...I remain stubborn in my belief that there is a credit crunch.  Here is one report:

How is trade finance coping with the credit crunch Badly. Steve Rodley, director of London-based shipping hedge-fund Global Maritime Investments, puts it bluntly: "The whole shipping market has crashed." The trouble is that credit ... has evaporated...

Here is another report.  Here are other reports.  Or read this account:...

Here are simple and in my view decisive quantitative indicators of the current domestic credit crisis.  Or here is another report:

According to experts interviewed by Bloomberg, "letters of credit and the credit lines for trade currently are frozen," and as a result, "nothing is moving".

Or here is a recent survey of U.S. retailing CFOs:

Some 41 percent of US retailers are seeing tight credit as a result of the crisis in the banking sector, and many will cut staff and reduce buying as a result...

Many other surveys paint a similar picture. I can only repeat my earlier words that immediate credit flows are demand-driven and they do not measure bad credit conditions concurrently because they stem from prior bank commitments. ...  Here is Wikipedia on lagging indicators and yes it tells you that standard forms of credit fall into this category and this has been understood for some time.  Look instead at the currently informative pieces of the evidence and you will see that they point in a very consistent direction. 

It is true that many credit channels have not shut down.  But the ones that are shutting down are enough to cause a severe global recession.

Update: James Kwak has more.