Still asking: where's the credit crunch?

As I first reported here on November 18, the available data indicate that there was, in fact, no national credit crisis. Kudos to David Sirota for the reporting there, and apparently he's been keeping up on it in the meantime- read the whole report here, entitled "Did America get punked on the bailout? Yes, now here's what to do".

If you don't believe him (I must admit that even I was skeptical), check out the source data. It comes from the Federal Reserve's own numbers, as reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis' Research Division. Their main working paper is here, and the technical details are here. He also quotes from a Reuter's story which says

"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.

Did you get that? The stories they are telling you are contradicted by their own data! So there are two possibilites:

1. Bush, Paulson, Bernanke & Co. are stupid. Extremely stupid. So incredibly stupid that they cannot understand what a column of basic numbers are telling them. So stupid they frequently have to stop and wipe the drool from their slack jaws as they stumble incoherently about. So stupid they are in danger of drowning if they look at the sky when it's raining.
   
2. They are group of utterly brazen thieves, that have (so far) managed to extort trillions of dollars from .

And I don't think they're that stupid.