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'I'd rather have a bowl of credit crunch'

10th Aug 2008
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Saturday the 9 August was the anniversary of 'the credit crunch'.

If you were wondering, as I was wondering, writes Nichola Ross Martin, how the 'crunch' came to have a particular birth date, I looked it up: it was the day in which the European Central Bank injected €94.8bn into the money markets to try and free up lending.

This expensive and dramatic intervention followed the admission early last year that US banks had been packaging up and overvaluing sub-prime loans. HSBC was first to come forward - it was writing off over $10bn in bad debts, credit ratings plummeted and two of Bear Stearns' hedge funds collapsed. Triple 'A's turned to triple 'duds' and then of course Northern Rock rocked the boat over here and getting a mortgage became rather tricky.

In this age of sub-prime, Fannie Maes and Freddie Macs thought that 'credit crunch' might be a good name for a new 'value' cereal bar - the sort you might purchase when strapped for cash and forced to breakfast in the coffee shop equivalent to a Lidl or Aldis. Maybe... but perhaps not. Well, maybe not just yet.

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By jamesbailey
11th Aug 2008 09:42

Too late, Nichola!
The excellent Devonshire Ice Cream maker, Langage Farm, has already come up with a new flavour called "Credit Crunch". It's basically vanilla with a sort of nutty cherry flavour to it - and much more fun than a cereal bar!

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