Just about every major Atlantic Canadian seafood processor holds lines of enter upon the credit side from the Icelandic banks, including Newfoundland’s Barry Group and Ocean Choice International Inc., and Nova Scotia’s High Liner Foods Inc. (TSX: HLF) and Clearwater Seafoods Income Fund (TSX: CLR.UN). High Liner has less than $15 the multitude outstanding on a $40-million credit line from Landsbanki, but says that the bank’s failure won’t impact the company.

Clearwater, though, hasn’t escaped unscathed. The Halifax income fund’s bid to take itself solitary has been delayed because of Glitnir’s 10% stake in the deal that includes $190 million in fault financing. Clearwater CEO Colin MacDonald called the delay from Glitnir’s dead failure “some inconvenience,” but added: “They weren’t critical to our existence by the agency of any put forth of the imagination.”

Some critics try conclusions that the global credit pass, with its ability to negatively force financial dealings that are continents into two parts, is just one more manifestation of why businesses will go to regional economies of scale, at least in the short term. Nayan Chanda, editor of Yale University’s YaleGlobal Online magazine and author of Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization, says energy prices are already prompting businesses to relocate supply chains regionally to cut back on transportation costs. With attractive credit provisions pop vanished from the emporium, companies will also look closer to home with respect to financing afresh.

But Chanda cautions that in the case of credit, regionalization will only last until the market regains its balance and loans begin to move along easily again. At that point, Chanda says, lenders will go after borrowers one time more, and as more people return to the credit market, interest rates self-reliance once again drop.

Newfoundland’s Taylor says part of the censure for the credit mess spreading through Atlantic Canada’s seafood industry extends to the Canadian banks. He argues that, traditionally, the banks have viewed the fishing industry as a poor credit risk and acquire done little to support the companies. “There’s a reason why Canadian industries, and the fishing industry in particular, have gone to Iceland to secure financing, and it’s because the Canadian banking industry has not been very accommodating,” says Taylor.

Gary Hufbauer, senior equal at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., goes a step further: he faults the Bank of Canada for not watching more closely over the international lending practices Canadian companies engage in. Says Hufbauer: “I’m surprised the Canadian authorities didn’t see the exposure and weren’t more proactive in terms of looking at how these Icelandic banks were managed.”

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