From the Washington Post:

We collect money from local savers, and we lend it in the local community,” said William Dunkelberg, chairman of Liberty Bell Bank in Cherry Hill, N.J. “We’re doing fine. There are 9,000 financial institutions out there, and most of them are small and most of them are doing fine.

The most recent Federal Reserve data show that the volume of outstanding bank loans declined 0.5 percent from the last week of August to the second week of September, though it was up more than 6 percent from the corresponding time last year.

With all the partisan politics and unrelated spending being attached to the ‘bailout bill’ it’s damn hard to say if there is a crisis or not.

And as to the liquidity of credit markets its possible the free market h:

Smaller banks, by contrast, make few mortgage loans, and their lending is fueled by deposits, rather than borrowing. That has insulated them from the troubles on Wall Street.

“We’re drowning in liquidity because people are pulling money out from other places and depositing it with us,” said Peter Fitzgerald, chairman of Chain Bridge Bancorp in McLean. “Our bank has benefited tremendously.”

And even if you do think a ‘bailout’ is needed, do you trust the government to be able to do it? And do we really want a bill created over merely a week?

From Reason:

This thing was The PATRIOT Act of the financial world. That is, it’s a bill designed to address an enormously complicated situation that will have incredibly far-reaching implications probably for decades. Warren Buffet and others have invoked Pearl Harbor to conjure up the need for speed when it comes to the bailout. But this isn’t war. Or terrorism. Or even a depression. We’ve got time to work through the details, which are all that matter. There isn’t any need to pass virtually any bill in seven days, or even seven weeks, or even seven months. Especially important ones. That’s one (of many) lessons of The PATRIOT Act experience.

Is the ‘crisis’ a con or a real crisis? The only way to be sure is to let the worst happen. Which is not a good way of finding out if it is a crisis.