The International Monetary Fund has had a strange credit crunch. Like a mighty navy rendered impotent because all of the fighting is inland, the IMF has been impotent: all of the liquidity and solvency problems have hit individual banks, rather than the countries it is set up to rescue. That makes its policy and monitoring efforts, such as Tuesday’s Global Financial Stability Report , all the more important.

The report gives a snapshot of the credit squeeze – problems spreading beyond subprime to other debt markets, feedback loops as credit problems hurt house prices and investment, resilient emerging markets – and updates its estimate of ultimate US debt losses to $945bn. The IMF offers a list of sensible, although not especially new, policy actions for the public and private sectors.