In today's Wall Street Journal an article discusses the impact of the subprime lending pullback. Here are some key points:

While tightening lending standards for home buyers with weak credit records, U.S. banks aren't raising the bar for applicants for conventional mortgages. About 85% of banks responding to a Federal Reserve survey said standards for home loans to people with stronger credit "remained basically unchanged." The rest tightened their requirements."Tighter standards on subprime and nontraditional mortgage loans generally were not associated with a move toward more-stringent lending policies for prime mortgages," the Fed said in one of its periodic surveys of senior loan officers.

Any talk of a subprime contagion seems premature given this result which is best titled a modest credit tightening.