"PLEASE SIR, CAN I have some more," whine the Oliver Twists on Wall Street. More interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve Board's monetary policy committee, a bigger portion of stimulus from the president and Congress, more direct relief for the housing market, a bail-out of bond insurers--you name it, and investors and bankers want more of it. Except for write-downs: the increased recognition of losses that nervous auditors are demanding is the one thing the bankers don't want any more of piled onto their plates.

This desire for more doesn't result from any recent period of deprivation: year-end bonuses, although frequently paid in bank shares rather than cash, have been relatively generous. Rather, it is that toilers in the financial services sector see lean times ahead, with the current round of lay-offs accelerating, and the value of their homes, especially second homes, dropping.

Worse still, the U.S. economy seems to be in dire shape. Desmond Lachman, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, expects "a more painful recession and one of longer duration than the nine months characterizing the average post-war recession," rather than one that is "relatively mild by historical standards," as Goldman Sachs' economists are predicting. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson says "the worst is just beginning" in the subprime mortgage market. "More Economists Signal Recession", headlines the Wall Street Journal.

Nor will the rest of the world be unaffected by America's woes. The Financial Stability Forum (a group of leading central bankers) expects "further shocks . . .

We know three things, or think we do. The first is that credit is more difficult to come by, both for businesses and consumers. Not because interest rates are unattractive to borrowers, but because lenders have gotten pickier about whose IOUs they are prepared to accept. Second, we know that the housing sector is in almost terminal disarray, with foreclosures and inventories of unsold units rising, and prices falling. Finally, we know that the U.S. economy is, at minimum, slowing, and possibly already in recession. Hence the investment bankers' demands for "more": Ben Bernanke must cut interest rates, and the president must meet the demands of Senate Democrats to enhance the $168 billion stimulus package he signed last week.

Really? Consider each of those certainties in turn. To those who moan about a credit crisis, Warren Buffett, the legendary sage of Omaha, has this to say, "Money is available and it's really quite cheap." What he calls the "dumb money" might have stopped chasing risky investments, but cash is readily available for sound deals and to sound creditors.

As for the housing market, it is not at all clear that the problems are as severe as they have been made to seem. Yes, builders have built more homes than the market can now absorb. But interest rates are falling, government agencies have gained permission to be more active in the mortgage markets, lenders have agreed to renegotiate terms with hard-pressed subprime borrowers, and many local markets are doing quite well. Indeed, the widely reported house-price indices that are producing so much talk of price collapse are so imperfect that Charles Calormiris, an economist at New York's Columbia University, says that "Housing prices may not be falling as much as some economists say they are." One index shows a decline of 4.5 percent between the third quarters of 2006 and 2007, while a similarly constructed and equally well-regarded index shows a rise of 1.8 percent in house prices across the nation in that period, leading Wall Street Journal economist David Wessel to conclude that "puzzles remain."