The Daily Telegraph (UK) wringing its hands over a worrisome drop in the money supply, with bank loans falling at a 14% annual rate, and that M3 is falling at a 5% annual rate.

Anyone know the reliability of the Telegraph, because I’m a bit dubious of this assessment, because the Federal Reserve stopped reporting M3 in 2006., see the graph pr0n courtesy of Shadowstats.com.

The estimated figure looks like a significant drop off in M3, or at least the folks at Shadowstats best estimate of M3, but M2 is stable, and M1 is through the roof, so I’m not sure if all this gloom and doom reporting is warranted.

British financial journalism tends to be a bit more alarmist than that of the US, particularly in The Grauniad^*, so I’m wondering how real this is.

^*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”