Lending may be booming - and at an 18-year high on some measures - but the chief arena of growth in the credit crunch is lenders accommodating each other.Loans by banks to other financial institutions increased 63 per cent to $62.7 billion between the middle of the year (and so just before the crunch hit) and the end of December 2007.Business credit advanced by banks increased 16 per cent since the middle of the year, based on monthly data compiled by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority. Separate data compiled by the Reserve Bank of Australia, and covering all lenders and not just banks, shows a similar rate of growth.To look at this data in another way, loans by banks to financial institutions accounted for 3.6 per cent of all bank lending in the middle of the year. Those loans now account for in excess of five per cent of all bank lending (a number that exceeded $1 trillion for the first time over the course of 2007).On this basis, one of the oft-repeated lines about the credit crunch that banks are unwilling, or at least reluctant, to lend to each other isn't true.On the aggregate industry data it appears that banks lending to each other, and to similar institutions, is in fact at the forefront of the supply and demand for credit in the economy at present.