So far I haven’t been one to complain about the banks not lending enough. I was particularly unimpressed by the bleatings of various businesses that they couldn’t cope unless they could borrow. I thought – and still think – that many of those businesses were just being badly run and were blaming a lack of lending for their own failures.

However, it has now got to the point where the housing market – even in London, potentially – could dry up completely because people with assets and decent incomes can’t get mortgages. Buy-to-let mortgages are becoming scarcer and even the usual Standard Variable Rate (SVR) mortgages are now rarer than hen’s teeth.

Business lending is also at rock bottom. This means that genuinely good businesses, or genuinely good business ideas coming from people with experience, are being starved at source.

I don’t think that austerity measures are causing the economy to founder. I do think that banking stupidity and fear are.

Not only that but I am seeing a very worrying trend of big business not paying their bills or not paying their bills on time (like 6 months late!) which is also destroying small businesses…the lifeblood of our economy.

I’ll be writing more on this later but a concerted campaign is needed on both these issues, mainly at government level.

What do you think?