I am back from a break in Florida, where nobody talks about falling house prices any more.

They are a self-evident axiom illustrated by the lack of activity on half-finished building sites where developers have run out of money or else decided to keep their bank facilities out of harm's way for the duration.

So it is pleasant to come back to a reminder that on this side of the water not everybody is overwhelmed by doom.

There was an email from the EEF about a credit crunch survey confirming that British industry is faring a great deal better than British banking.

Only three per cent of the respondents said that they face a "significant" increase in the cost of borrowed money.

Forty per cent reported no change at all. Only 20 per cent said the crunch was having a negative impact on investment. And three times as many said it made no difference.

Small companies are having much the same experience as big ones. Inter-bank distrust may be rife to the extent that banks refuse to lend to each other for longer than overnight, but they are still content to go on making money lending to most of the EEF's members.

Long may that continue.

You never know, it may, if the pound goes on drifting lower. And that would restore British industry's competitive edge.

With all the misery in the US, American exporters are enjoying a terrific run courtesy of the cheap dollar.

Then look at the stock market. The debate is whether the bear market has already begun, or whether it is lurking round the corner for 2008.

Well, a newsletter called "The Advisor", intended for IFAs, took a look at what the market did in the last two British recessions.

In 1980-84, when a disastrous engineering strike was followed by the Thatcher Government's dismantling of mass employment manufacturing, the All-share index rose each year, by an annual average of 27.7 per cent.

Then in 1991-95, when house prices dropped by 18.4 per cent from peak to trough and did not recover measured against other inflation until 1998, in only one year did share prices finish lower than they started.

That was 1994 when the loss was a bearable 5.9 per cent.

Note: both those recessions entailed banking crises as well as currency crises and stricken property markets and the kind of unemployment we have come to regard as history.

Yet share prices comfortably outstripped the inflation of the time, although they did not in the cruel recession of the mid-70s.

That, hopefully, really is history. The catch with all this is that you can get a nasty bear market without much in the way of a recession.

It happened only seven years ago. Then stock markets had been carried away by the notion that technology had transformed the working landscape and abolished the business cycle - just as G Brown later claimed he had done.

This time the transformation is supposedly coming from India and China. Those countries may well be about to take an unwelcome breather along the way.

But you cannot blame them for Northern Rock. :