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"Some of the Conclusions Drawn are Simply False"
Economist's View — ... Analysis!, The Economist: If you have been paying attention to the news, to financial experts, to economists ... then you may have heard that there have been some recent problems... ...

Four Myths of the Credit Crisis, Again
Marginal Revolution — Contra Tyler (see below) neither the post from Free Exchange nor Mark Thoma's comments are compelling or well thought out.  The Minn. Fed. presented data demonstating that four widely reported claims about the credit crisis are myths - do either of the cited links claim that any of these myths are in fact true?  No.  Do either of the cited links present any data at all on the quantity of credit?  No.  Many people cite prices/rates/spreads as evidence for the crisis but what we ultimately care about quantity not ...

The Bank Lending Debate
The Baseline Scenario — ... For those who spend too much time reading economics blogs, there was a bit of a stir in the last few days over a paper by three economists at the Minneapolis Fed, which essentially said that bank lending to the real economy had not been affected by the supposed credit crisis. There were articles on the topic by Alex Tabarrok, Free Exchange, Mark Thoma, me, Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok again, Free Exchange again, and Tyler Cowen again, among others. My main issue was that the charts in the paper said ...

Was There Really a Financial Crisis ?
The Big Picture — ... loan activity. The graphs above show there has been an impact, it’s not negative yet, but there has been a sharp downturn. It also suggests that if the downturn follows previous patterns - and hopefully Fed intervention or private sector adjustment will prevent that (see the hopeful signs at the end of some of the series above) - but if it does repeat the pattern, we still have a long way to go before things turn around. And then there is this rebuttal from Tyler Cowan: First of all, some of the conclusions drawn are simply false. ...

More papers on the credit crunch
Econbrowser — Links to some interesting papers that I recently read. The first comes from a conference on financial markets held at the start of this month at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Last fall, V.V. Chari, Larry Christiano, and Pat Kehoe received a lot of attention (e.g., Tabarrok, Avent, Economist, Kwak, Bonddad, and Thoma [1], [2], [3],) for noting that aggregate lending by banks was in fact increasing during the period in which many analysts were describing it as sharply curtailed. At the Chicago ...