Financial institutions warned this week that the new Basel III banking rules could spell the end of the "cheap money era" that characterised the build-up to the Credit Crunch.
The warning came after regulators imposed new rules that more than triple the amount of capital that banks are required to hold as protection against potential losses.
The increase, from 2% to 7%, prompted the British Bankers Association (BBA) to claim that the likely impact of the regulations was that the cost of borrowing would go up.
Angela Knight, chief executive of the BBA, said: "The liquidity requirements are significant, as these feed through to the price and the availability of lending.
"A bank is like any other business - if its fixed operating costs go up then so does the price of its product. The consequence is that inevitably the cost of credit - the price the borrower pays for money - will rise. The cheap money era is over."
However, Mark Nelson, of Compass Business Finance, argued that the price of credit would not be affected by the move.
"There will always be cheap credit in the market," he said. "It's a case of supply and demand. The banks have already restructured their balance sheets off their own backs. The new rules are more about making sure that in five years time we don't forget what happened in this cycle. I don't think they're going to have that big an impact on current lending."
Nelson added that some stability has returned to the credit market in the past six months, although at a much lower level than the highs of two years ago.
"It's a lot more stable than where it was, but it's still tough because there's a lot of caution in the market, some of which should have been there three years ago," he said.
"But lending does happen and as life returns to normal over the next few years that will continue to increase. At the moment people - both borrowers and lenders - have a better understanding of what is and is not possible."
Meanwhile, business secretary Vince Cable criticised the BBA response to the Basel III rules. "Our big banks are already well capitalised, so the new rules should not be used by banks as an excuse to restrict credit," he said.
