So it has taken just five months for the credit crunch to reach the credit card in your pocket.

No need to mourn the demise of reckless lending - unless you happen to be involved with DSG or other shops which had a rotten Christmas.

The credit crunch has brought overdue sense into sporty end of banking and no bad thing.

Nor does it matter unduly that mort-gages are harder to find and a bit dearer, anyway not while the Government's illjudged experiment with Home Inspection Packs has choked off the supply of houses coming up for sale.

That must be why the Land Registry says house prices rose, yes rose, by 0.6 per cent in November, even though Nationwide reported a 0.8 per cent fall.

Both are quite hefty moves for a single month.

I am inclined to back the Land Registry because it tracks all sales, while Nationwide sees only those deals where it lent money.

It is not that the housing market is ablaze again, only that there are still enough mortgages around to fund the present, freakishly low, level of activity.

Enough for the purpose, just the same. The unsettling bit of yesterday's Bank of England credit survey is about banks clamping down on lending to companies.

That will make corporate investment more expensive, more difficult, less attractive.

There will be less of it and eventually we will all suffer for it.

-----

Whichever way, there is less money around. What the banks have lost in the fall-out from the sub-prime fiasco may not be too tragic in the context of their bumper profits of recent years.

But it is still real money not available for them to lend, or as capital to support lending.

Yet this money shortage is strictly a Western, more particularly American, distress. There is no dearth of the stuff in Russia, or Saudi Arabia, Norway, or anywhere else exporting high-priced oil faster than the Government spends the proceeds.

Nor, come to that, China where the mega trade surpluses have not all been squandered in loss-making investments in US Government bonds.

Curiously there is also cash galore in Singapore, where they don't export oil, or anything else much.

It is done by canny Government. Clanny, too. The Prime Minister's wife is chief executive of the fund that bailed out Merrill Lynch to the tune of £2.5 billion last month, though someone else runs a separate Singapore fund that pumped a much-needed £4.8 billion into the Swiss UBS.

The political implications of sovereign wealth funds buying the pillars of western capitalism are plain to see. But so is the financial necessity.

Hillary Clinton was a vocal supporter of the outrage that stopped the Dubai bidder for P&O from getting control of US ports owned by P&O in 2006. Now she maintains an icy silence about Abu Dhabi's £3.75 billion investment in Citicorp.

It is better that way.

Free markets do enable everybody to benefit from other people's money.

Still, would you welcome a bid for Centrica from Gazprom, say, the people who cut off Ukraine's gas a couple of years back?