The current crisis, as unless you have been holed up in a cave in Cornwall for the past two weeks you will probably already know, was sparked by the US sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Many economic pundits say that the UK lending system is radically different from that in the US, so we shouldn’t suffer to the same extent. But the news coverage, falling share prices and generally shaky confidence are clearly having an effect on lenders with many expected to tighten up lending conditions and even raise their borrowing rates.

While now this belt-tightening talk is fo-cused on consumer lending, it can’t be long before business borrowers feel the effect.

Of course, with print heading into its traditionally busy part of the year, the short-term impact should be negligible. The worry is if the situation gets worse or continues into the New Year when many print businesses’ cashflow is seriously stretched. This could be bad news.

Hopefully by then though, things will have calmed down and the media will find something else to focus on, because I believe in many ways the crisis is being fuelled by the press. But the fact the US crisis has occurred during a quiet news cycle doesn’t make the scaremongering any less likely to drive a vicious circle of weak consumer and lender confidence, ultimately damaging business.

So at its core, it seems the old adage, ‘if the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold’ never seemed truer. But equally perhaps we should introduce a new phrase into the annals of clichés, ‘if the media says we’ve got a cold, then we all sneeze’.

Darryl Danielli is editor of PrintWeek