Shock horror survey. Not.

There are two ways of looking at the latest Quarterly Economic Survey of local businesses carried out by Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Chamber.
One is that it's a real shocker, with manufacturing and service sector firms so gloomy that the survey's normal graphs had to be re-drawn to allow extra negative territory.
The other is that, as bad as it is, it's no surprise.
John Dowson, the Chamber's policy director (pictured), makes the point that underneath the gloom there are still companies out there that are doing OK, others that are infact thriving.
But even he doesn't try to put a positive gloss on a survey that is a graphic reflection of what happens in a global economic downturn. For Notts firms, sales at home and abroad have fallen.
Many business people don't want to be told again and again that there's a recession and life's awful. They know that already, and some get mightily hacked off by a relentless diet of what they see as the blindingly obvious.
They do want to know what is going to be done to improve credit conditions, which holds the key to softening the impact of that recession and giving business a better chance of coming out the other side in good shape.
If you take the survey at face value, the impact of banks withholding credit may have been over-played, with only 18% of local firms saying they had problems getting hold of money.
That could reflect the fact that a lot of privately-owned businesses have been far more careful with cash than consumers were.
But it may also be significant that 45% of firms hadn't tried to get hold of any money during the period of the survey, and that rising numbers of manufacturing and service sector businesses are reporting worsening cash flow (money coming in and going out of a business).
This suggests there will be rising demand for credit at a time when it has, if anything, been reducing.
The Chamber's survey essentially covers the last three months of 2008, and it's difficult to see the first three months of this year being very different.
What happens in the second and third quarters will be more interesting. It's then that we could see early signs of the economy flattening out.
As for the green shoots of recovery...unless credit conditions improve it could be same time next year before we see them.