Money makes the world go around, borrowed money, that is.

So when it dries up we must expect the globe to stop spinning, well, spin too slowly for comfort.

Yet it is possible to exaggerate the much-advertised money shortage.

It is not so much that the stuff isn't there as that banks may be hoarding it just in case they need some to plug a last-minute hole in their balance sheets as they tidy them into publishable form on New Year's Eve.

So Mervyn King's Bank of England is offering £10 billion at its rock-bottom Bank Rate of 5.75 per cent to those that want it for five whole weeks until mid-January, when the discipline of assembling numbers fit for nerds to pore over will have passed.

That way it hopes to avoid the kind of money shortage where the cost of money in real life loses touch with the rate the Bank sets.

Since the American Fed and the European Central Bank are doing much the same, it ought to work.

We could have another nasty mess if it doesn't.

Curiously, away from the torrid world of banking, much life is going on as if there was no crisis at all.

Most shops are faring better than this time last year, to judge from yesterday's CBI survey.

A majority are looking for a better Christmas, too, although last December was no great shakes.

This year's manufacturing boom may have lost some of its fizz.

Yet Brian Cooke, who has been running Castings in Brownhills for even longer than I have been filling this space, points out that there is no sign of any slowdown at the truck and car companies he supplies.

His problem is kicking an American-owned electricity company into ordering a transformer he needs for a new £11 million moulding line, so that it can start up in early 2009.

Demand for transformers is such when you order one you have to wait at least a year.

Mr Cooke is a special case in that he has never gone in for an "efficient" balance sheet, so no panicky bank manager can say 'boo' to him. He doesn't need to borrow the £11 million.

Castings was sitting on £28 million of clear cash at the end of September. Sometimes it pays to be old-fashioned.

Even the housing market is not necessarily heading into a black hole.

Yes, it has turned quiet, coming out of orbit and not before time.

Nationwide's measure of house prices fell this month - but still by less than October's freakish-looking 1.1 per cent

increase. And while there is a balance of estate agents saying house prices have fallen over the past three months, a majority thinks they are unchanged.

That is not a rout.

What has fallen sharply is the number of mortgages approved for house purchase by banks and building societies.

It was down to 88,000 last month from a peak of 128,000 in late 2006.

Some of that, but by no means all of it, arises from fewer homes coming up for sale. Unsecured consumer credit, though, has been rising briskly since August.

Maybe people who cannot afford to buy a home are splashing out on a car instead.

Unwise, perhaps, but not the portent of a crisis.