See this excellent posting by Robert Higgs, who has an eye for these things. He looks at the credit markets to find that there is not calamitous shortage. “The sky is not falling. Lenders continue to lend at high rates, and the economy continues to operate reasonably well.”

I’m glad that someone has said it. The only real crisis is the one being created by the response. As the days have dragged on, it is becoming increasingly obvious that that the Bush administration is attempting to turn a series of business failures in the midst of a downturn–with traceable errors rooted in government policy–into a scary national calamity as a way of looting the country on behalf of the government and its friends.

Another way to say that is that this “crisis” is really a big fake that the policy response can turn into something real. In the same way that the Bush administration turned the criminal events of 9-11 into an act of war requiring a globalized military response–which has generated more terrorism and destruction–it is taking some splashy business failures in a few sectors of the economy, failures which signal the existence of an economic downturn, and attempting to turn them into a rationale for full-scale financial socialism that really would be our doom.

Now we have Bush himself getting in on the act, warning that we will have a scary depression unless we all fork over now. And yet, if we do follow the plan of Paulson/Bernanke/Bush, we will get the very depression of which they warn. Good thing that they don’t seem to be persuading the majority.

Here are some charts showing that the “credit crisis,” for example, is a hoax: