Crisis? What crisis?

A funny thing happened last week. I bought a car.

A small sport utility, actually. I leased the vehicle three years ago, and since it had low milage, I bought it when the lease expired. Plunked a couple thou down to keep the payment low and signed up for a 24 month payout.

Okay, you're still waiting for the comedy part to kick in, I know.

The funny part was how easy it was to get the loan. I walked into the dealership, signed some papers, and bang-zoom, drove off with the car. They'll send me the first statement at the end of this month.

Hahaha...wait, no that still isn't funny.

All right, so maybe it wasn't funny, at least not in the ha ha sense. More like it was funny in the peculiar sense.

You see, I keep reading about how the credit market is frozen up. I keep reading about how "we need to get the banks out loaning money again." But I didn't have a problem getting a loan. From where I'm standing, there is no problem borrowing money.

In all fairness, the interest rate was higher than I wanted to pay. My last car loan was five years ago, and at that time the best rate was 5%. This loan was at 7 percent. Given that the Fed funds rate is lower than it was five years ago, my new car loan is actually more profitable for the bank than the old loan was.

Also, I have a sterling credit rating, and I put a chunk of money down on the transaction. The odds of this loan going nipples up are vanishingly remote.

So maybe the problem is not that the banks aren't loaning money. Maybe the problem is that the banks aren't loaning money to poor credit risks.

Can you blame them? After all, it was loaning money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back that got the banks in trouble in the first place.