Looking for the data

The information security industry has its share of disinformation and misinformation that's spread by vendors, most of which is meant to make their products look more useful than they really are. Because of this, I've learned to be skeptical of any numbers than vendors use to help sell their products. If you take a close look at the data and the ways in which vendors spin it, you often find that their interpretation doesn't withstand much careful examination. This knee-jerk reaction to question data and its interpretation recently led me to look for data that quantifies the "credit crunch" that's widely discussed in the media.

The best source of raw data that I found is Federal Reserve Statistical Release H.8, Assets and Liabilities of Commercial Banks in the United States. You can find this here. The data that I looked at gives weekly values from January 3, 1973 through December 31, 2008. There may be more recent data available now.

If you look at this data, it's hard to find signs of credit decreasing. Here's the data for total bank credit.

Here's the data for the past two years. It's hard to see signs of credit decreasing on this time scale either.

 

So if there's a shortage of available credit, it's hard to see it from this data. This doesn't mean that there's no credit crunch. It just means that it's not obvious from the data that the Federal Reserve has on the amount of loans being made by banks. It might be the case that businesses in capital-intensive sectors like life sciences, telecommunications, utilities and energy don't get their funding from banks, so their loans aren't reflected in this data. Maybe there's other data somewhere that shows a downward trend in credit. Any ideas where it is?