The stocks set to benefit from the credit squeeze

The credit crunch may have hit the big mortgage banks hard. But as mainstream lenders turn away more prospective borrowers and higher food and fuel costs begin to bite, there's one sector that will really come into its own again.

The old line from Hamlet, "neither a borrower nor a lender be", is actually a pretty useless piece of advice.

Most of us need to borrow money at some point even if we'd never think of taking a personal loan to buy a car or a television, we're more than likely to have to get a mortgage if we ever hope to buy a house. But like it or not, both borrowers and lenders are coming under increasing pressure as the US sub-prime-inspired credit crisis gradually pushes up the cost of money across the economy.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.