by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:

This is moving even faster than a lot of us thought that it would.  For weeks, I have been warning my readers about the coming credit crunch.  When banks get into trouble, they start getting really tight with their money.  That means fewer mortgages, fewer commercial real estate loans, fewer auto loans and fewer credit cards being issued.  But I thought that it would take some time for the credit crunch to fully kick into high gear.  Unfortunately, I was wrong about that.  In fact, it is being reported that during the last two weeks of March bank lending in the United States “contracted by the most on record”…