Credit Crisis is a Myth - Reuters Drops a Bomb

Reuters printed this article (HT: Robert Murphy) outlining a report from Celent, a financial services consultancy. I blogged here and here that I believed that the entire "crisis" was grossly overstated and based on an insular Wall Street perspective. The entire article is fantastic so read the whole thing, but here are the choicest of excerpts:

The credit crunch is not nearly as severe as the U.S. authorities appear to believe and public data actually suggest world credit markets are functioning remarkably well, a report released on Thursday says.
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"It is startling that many of (Federal Reserve) Chairman (Ben) Bernanke and (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson's remarks are not supported or are flatly contradicted by the data provided by the very organizations they lead," said the report.
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"I don't think they're fabricating stuff but what I think they are doing is taking the situation of a handful of institutions and generalizing that to the market as a whole, incorrectly," said Marenzi.
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ALL A MYTH?
Regarding U.S. business access to credit, the report says:
*Overall U.S. bank lending is at its highest level ever and has grown during the current financial crisies.
*U.S. commercial bank lending is at record highs and growing particularly fast since May 2007.
*Corporate bond issuance has declined but increased commercial lending has compensated for this.
*lending hit its highest level ever in September 2008 and remained high in October and that overall interbank lending is up 22 percent since the start of the financial crisis, taken to be mid-2007.

The article goes on with information from the report that reveals little or no evidence of a broad credit crunch in the U.S., Europe, or Japan. Please go to this article and forward it to anyone you think might be interested.