They took inspiration from, of all things, Cap'n Crunch.

Within a year, Rainforest Crunch was on the shelves.

The signs might indicate that the complexity crunch is only going to get worse.

God forbid we should use that same standard that we make Cap'n Crunch live by and bring it to drug companies.

Derry go a point ahead of Cork City and the teams meet at the Brandywell on Monday night in a crunch encounter.

Or General David Richards to come in 2006 and say he had the strategy and the resources to deliver the crunch year.

And I would bring people to the lab and I would put their finger in it, and I would crunch it a little bit.

And I would crunch it for long periods and short periods, and pain that went up and pain that went down, and with breaks and without breaks all kinds of versions of pain.

But the liquidity crunch was not the only problem there was also a solvency problem. Indeed, in the US today, hundreds of thousands possibly two million households are bankrupt and thus will default on their mortgages.

Indeed, at the peak of the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, gold prices fell sharply a few times. In an extreme credit crunch, leveraged purchases of gold cause forced sales, because any price correction triggers margin calls.

By pumping in whatever liquidity the financial sector needs to alleviate the credit crunch, the ECB is effectively maintaining a deflationary bias for the financial sector, whereas it has announced an inflationary bias for the rest of the economy.

I love the way that they'll stare slack jawed at their first baseball game with wide eyes and a mitt on their hand, soaking in the crack of the bat and the crunch of the peanuts and the smell of the hotdogs.

For example, during the housing bust in the United States in the late 1980 s, many banks that were mortgage lenders (the Savings ampamp Loans Associations) went belly up, leading to a banking crisis, a credit crunch, and a recession in 1990 1991.

Monetary policy has been prudent, and the threat of inflation has now been lessened by the decline in commodity and oil prices. The international balance of payments remains in surplus, and there is still a net capital inflow despite the global credit crunch.

Five years after the credit crunch of 2007 2008, it seems that they cannot. And, without even that justification, the latest wave of criticism of the US dollar standard appears set to rise further and to stimulate the search for a new arrangement.

When the crunch comes almost certainly in the year or two following the election it will cause radical, wrenching change, perhaps even more far reaching than Charles de Gaulle s coup d état, which led to the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958.

Consider also the credit markets. Prime borrowers with good credit scores and investment grade firms are not experiencing a credit crunch at this point, as the former have access to mortgages and consumer credit while the latter have access to bond and equity markets.

That has been precisely the problem with the aggressive provision of liquidity, quantitative easing, and the reduction of central bank interest rates used to address the current crisis. In today s credit crunch, as in the Great Depression, central banks lend at practically zero interest rates.

This is not to argue, of course, that the ECB should cut interest rates now. On the contrary, the Bank s current policy of fighting inflationary pressures by slower growth, a stronger euro, and the credit crunch seems just about right for the time being.

They live from paycheck to paycheck often a shrinking paycheck, owing to the decline in hourly wages and hours worked. And the credit crunch for non investment grade firms and smaller firms, which rely mostly on access to bank loans rather than capital markets, is still severe.

Without disputing the need for some deleveraging, a new incarnation of the Vienna Initiative Vienna 2.0 seeks to make the process orderly. After all, excessive and chaotic deleveraging by lenders to emerging Europe and the ensuing credit crunch would destabilize this economically and institutionally fragile region.

Barcelona The financial crisis, credit crunch, and ensuing economic downturn have severely damaged the credibility of financial markets, institutions, and traders. More and more people are claiming that markets are characterized by irrationality, bubbles, fads, and frenzies, and that economic actors are driven by behavioral biases.

The mortgage crisis and the credit crunch have led to bailouts for the banks and the nationalization of housing finance and insurance. America needs to rein in its household and fiscal spending, so that it can cut the amount of money that it borrows and owes.

The recession in other advanced economies (the euro zone, United Kingdom, European Union, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) started in the second quarter of 2008, before the financial turmoil in September and October further aggravated the global credit crunch. This contraction has become even more severe since then.

Instead, banks have hoarded the increase in the monetary base in the form of idle excess reserves. There is a credit crunch, as banks with insufficient capital do not want to lend to risky borrowers, while slow growth and high levels of household debt have also depressed credit demand.

The recent turmoil in global financial markets and the liquidity and credit crunch that followed raises two questions how did defaulting sub prime mortgages in the American states of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida lead to a worldwide crisis? And why did systemic risk increase rather than decrease in recent years?

Major financial institutions went bust others were bought up on the cheap or survived only after major bailouts. Global stock markets fell by more than 50 interest rate spreads skyrocketed a severe liquidity and credit crunch appeared and many emerging market economies staggered to the International Monetary Fund for help.

Indeed, just as microeconomic problems in the financial sector triggered a credit crunch and fueled a global recession, so microeconomic factors hold the key to recovery. Many economies need to fix the financial sector and restore credit, while many more need to raise productivity in order to boost growth and create jobs.

To avoid an additional credit crunch as banks deleverage, banks should be given some short term forbearance on capital and liquidity requirements. Also, since the US and EU financial systems remain unlikely to provide credit to small and medium size enterprises, direct government provision of credit to solvent but illiquid SMEs is essential.

Bad banks that are constructed generously enough to provide banks with hidden equity injections are one way to avoid or mitigate the credit crunch. But establishing them would be a bad idea, because to do so would imply that government subsidization of banks, thereby creating incentives for imprudent behavior in the long run.

NEW YORK A vicious circle is currently underway in the United States, and its reach could broaden to the global economy. America s financial crisis has triggered a severe credit crunch that is making the US recession worse, while the deepening recession is leading to larger losses in financial markets thus undermining the wider economy.

America s deepening recession is slamming China s export sector, just as it has everywhere else in Asia. The immediate problem is a credit crunch not so much in China as in the United States and Europe, where many small and medium size importers cannot get the trade credits they need to buy inventory from abroad.

Crunch time is fast approaching. Cyprus is almost out of the euro, its banks collapse having been delayed by the European Central Bank s provision of Emergency Liquidity Assistance, while euroskeptic parties led by Beppe Grillo and Silvio Berlusconi garnered a combined total of 55 of the popular vote in the latest Italian general election.

Another 1.5 trillion is needed to bring banks capital back to pre crisis level, which is needed to resolve the credit crunch and restore lending to the private sector. So, the US banking system is effectively insolvent in the aggregate most of the British banking system looks insolvent, too, as do many continental European banks.

In the past, banks kept loans and mortgages on their books, retaining the credit risk. For example, during the housing bust in the United States in the late 1980 s, many banks that were mortgage lenders (the Savings ampamp Loans Associations) went belly up, leading to a banking crisis, a credit crunch, and a recession in 1990 1991.

The bond channel doesn t work when bond yields are already low and the credit channel doesn t work when banks hoard liquidity and velocity collapses. Indeed, those who can borrow (high grade firms and prime households) don t want or need to, while those who need to highly leveraged firms and non prime households can t, owing to the credit crunch.

The credit channel also is not working properly, as banks have hoarded most of the extra liquidity from QE, creating excess reserves rather than increasing lending. Those who can borrow have ample cash and are cautious about spending, while those who want to borrow highly indebted households and firms (especially small and medium size enterprises) face a credit crunch.

As a result, the biggest asset and credit bubble in human history is now going bust, with overall credit losses likely to be close to a staggering 2 trillion. Thus, unless governments rapidly recapitalize financial institutions, the credit crunch will become even more severe as losses mount faster than recapitalization and banks are forced to contract credit and lending.

When all deposit withdrawals were capped in November 2001, the resulting liquidity crunch deepened the recession and, eventually, brought down the government. By contrast, the restructuring of term deposits in January 2002 attenuated the bank run and kept the payments system alive, while allowing so called sight deposits which can be withdrawn immediately without penalty to help build demand for pesos.

The fact that there is even a small liquidity crunch for banks implies larger liquidity crunches for less intensively regulated financial institutions, and even greater liquidity crunches for manufacturing and real estate companies. It is hard to imagine that manufacturers are not now postponing orders of capitals goods, and that new home sales in America are not dropping right now.

The economy is slowing the Bank of Korea cut its growth forecast for this year to 4.7 , while the OECD expects only 4.3 growth inflation is rising, and some are concerned that Lee s policies are too geared toward foreign investors and big business. Lee also must confront factors beyond his control, such as soaring oil prices and the global credit crunch.

As traditional monetary policy becomes ineffective, other unorthodox policies will continue to be used policies to bail out investors, financial institutions, and borrowers massive provision of liquidity to banks in order to ease the credit crunch and even more radical actions to reduce long term interest rates on government bonds and narrow the spread between market rates and government bonds.

This lackluster performance, which followed years of decline in market shares, is difficult to explain, given that all other countries on the eurozone periphery recorded solid export growth. For example, Portuguese exports increased by about 5 6 per year over the last years, despite challenging external conditions (Spain is its biggest market) and a credit crunch, which made it difficult for exporters to obtain financing.

Meanwhile, the credit crunch in the eurozone periphery is intensifying thanks to the ECB long term cheap loans, banks there don t have a liquidity problem now, but they do have a massive capital shortage. Faced with the difficulty of meeting their 9 capital ratio requirement, they will achieve the target by selling assets and contracting credit not exactly an ideal scenario for economic recovery.

Small wonder that when the sub prime market blew up, these markets also froze. Because the size of the losses was unknown sub prime losses alone are estimated at between 50 billion and 200 billion, depending on the magnitude of the fall in home prices, which is also unknown and no one knew who was holding what, no one trusted counterparties, leading to a severe liquidity crunch.