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Sky News  Producer John Holliday

Families are more worried about their financial future, than any time in the last 20 years.

New research reveals consumer confidence is now in freefall, having dropped for the 10th month in a row. And with higher petrol prices, grocery bills and mortgage costs, it's easy to see why the slowdown has been so severe.

But are you checking the pound in your pocket? And if you could open a shop on the High Street at the moment would you?

Well one man who's competing for your money with the likes of Primark and Marks and Spencer thinks there will be no let up for struggling shops. 

Phil Wrigley, the Executive Chairman of fashion firm New Look, told Jeff Randall that the outlook for retail wasn't good - and it won't get any better next year.

But he did have a positive word for the internet, saying website sales at New Look were growing by five per cent.

Sky News business presenter Emma Crosby

Lloyds TSB makes it to the front page of the Daily Mail today as it reports that a 15 year old customer, who had just been given a debit card from the high street bank, bought cigarettes, Viagra and a fake adult ID online.

His Dad only found out when he received a Customs demand for duty on the cigarettes which his son had bought via an overseas web-based retailer.

So no doubt a very stern telling off for this South Wales teenager. His Dad is also none too pleased with the bank.

And this story has sparked a debate about the behaviour of our big banks. Should they be offering visa-enabled cards, which basically mean you can use them for more than getting money out of a cash machine, to customers under 16?

Well this case shows that the cards can be abused. Even though Lloyds TSB says it has a unique system to stop purchases from adult sites, if this report is accurate, it’s clearly not worked here.

What’s also irritated a lot of people is the way the bank has gone about this, writing directly to the kids to ask if they want this card and only suggesting they let their parents know about it rather than insisting on parental permission.

The Lib Dem Treasury spokesman Vince Cable goes as far as saying this is predatory behaviour, highlighting the fact that you are more likely to get divorced than change bank accounts.

So are banks trying to rope new customers in at too early an age? And post-credit crunch when the banking industry has been accused of fuelling our desire to spend beyond our means is this the correct way to teach young people about managing money?

Well may be it is. And in an internet age when kids are so computer savvy, buying music DVD’s and clothes with cash in a shop is almost pre-historic.

Maybe this is just a sign of the times and the spending habits of the internet generation.

Do let us know what you think.

Sky News business presenter Emma Crosby

More official data today reconfirming fears that the UK economy is slowing. Growth for the first three months of this year has actually been revised down to 0.3%. If it keeps going at this pace then the government's forecast in the March budget of 1.75% to 2.25% will be blown out of the water.

Buried in today's data is something even more interesting and also worrying. We saved just 1.1% of our incomes in the first 3 months of the year - the the lowest figure since 1959.

Think of 1959 and you might recall it being the year that Fidel Castro was sworn in as Cuban leader, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and at home the first section of the M1 opened. It was also a time when the UK was recovering from post-war austerity and had yet to enjoy the economic boom of the swinging sixties.

Is there much correlation in household budgets between 1959 and 2008? Not really. We have an awful lot more money to spend than we did back then. What's startling though is the current declining rate at which households are able to save money. In the past two years it's been shredded from 6% to 1.1%. And one of the main things to thank for that: Inflation.

Oil at record highs of more than $140 per barrel and food inflation running at an extra £1000 per household per year. So it's no surprise that the supermarket giants have engaged in a fierce price war this weekend to cling onto customers.

But it is a real worry that there's no money left at the end of the month to put in the piggy bank. For the past decade its been spend, spend, spend largely on credit cards and not much saving for a rainy day. Well it's looking pretty drizzly outside, we've no savings to fall back on, and because of rising prices there's not much cash left to start saving if we wanted to. This of course in complete contrast to Asian countries who have been squirreling away cash for a long time now.

How concerned are you? What's the remedy? Let us know your thoughts?

Sky News business editor Michael Wilson

You’ll be pleased to know that our current travails are "a one year pause" rather than a slump, slowdown or whatever else describes your current situation. That’s how the Governor of the Bank of England described our present hard times to his inquisitors from the Treasury Select Committee.

Pressed on the only question we really care about, he said “as recently as May, markets seemed to be pricing in two, three cuts in interest rates over the few months and then it suddenly swung round in a month to expecting two, three rises in interest rates. That seemed to me a rather sharp reaction to data. I think ours has been a more balanced response.”

He added “I am confident that we will bring inflation back to the target, but I cannot tell you what level of interest rates we will need to achieve that.”

So this is going to be the message for the next few months. Mervyn King hardened up his inflation message last week, both in his official letter to the Chancellor and in his Mansion House speech, and today he repeated the rate would rise above 4% by the end of the year.

But how confident can we be, though on the "one year pause", especially with today’s warning from OPEC’s president that the oil price could reach $170 a barrel?

“There is no magic bullet”, he said. I think we know that. I’m afraid we are in this strange territory of hope. Hope that there will be a controlled landing for the slowdown and an orderly decrease in prices. Dr King must know that the economy as it stands, or rather staggers, could not stand the hair shirt of interest rate rises. He also knows that the market is almost doing his job. As banks are repairing their balance sheets and inter-bank interest rates are so high; and as mortgage lending is getting increasingly expensive for borrowers, the economy is running on very tight margins. 

That might just engineer a slowdown that doesn’t stall us all. Let’s hope so.

Sky News business editor Michael Wilson

There is a slender ethical argument for doing business with the hell that is Zimbabwe - that anything which tries to help the economy, helps the people and the people deserve all the help they can get. That's effectively the excuse that Anglo American is using  for its £200m investment to build a platinum mine in central Zimbabwe, at a time when the state has descended  even further into Mugabe’s villainy.

However, Anglo’s proposed mine at Unki is neither here nor there in Zimbabwe’s sad employment statistics, perhaps giving jobs to 200 locals and 450 contractors.

What appeals to Anglo is producing platinum, which is one of the world’s most expensive metals – used not just in jewellery but in catalytic converters, LCD displays, computer hard disk drives and anti-cancer drugs. Zimbabwe has the second largest platinum deposits in the world. Anglo will also know that if they don’t do business with the country, there will always be someone who will. The EU first imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe in 2002. There may be more. Meanwhile the Chinese continue to bid for farming and exploration rights in the country.

Other companies like Rio Tinto, BP, Shell and British American Tobacco with considerable presence in Zimbabwe are either ‘reviewing’ their operations and none of them is increasing their business links. Barclays was accused last November of providing loans to senior members of Mugabe’s government who were running farms which his henchmen had seized – Barclays’ defence was that the loans were made by Barclays Bank of Zimbabwe which, while majority-owned by the UK based group, was incorporated in Zimbabwe. With such niceties, sanctions tend to unravel.

Much more important is the role of the South African Development Community - the club of fourteen countries including Zimbabwe - and the disgraceful performance of South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki who has actually blocked efforts to have the recent rigged election overturned. Africa itself needs to somehow show an influential and united effort to show how fed up it is with Mugabe and his cronies and to tell him forcibly, that now is the time to go.

Sky News business correspondent Joel Hills

Today the bosses of the UK's six big energy firms have appeared before the parliamentary business and enterprise select committee. The boss of Scottish and Southern, Ian Marchant joined the chief executive of British Gas, Sam Laidlaw, by saying that gas prices will continue to move up. They point out that by putting up prices suppliers are merely covering costs, not profiteering - indeed profits, he says, are paper thin. MPs were also reminded that UK consumers pay less for their gas than many of our European neighbours.

Gas and electricity prices have almost doubled in the last five years and with further rises of around 40% expected by the end of the winter MPs are getting worried. There are calls for the government to reduce the pressure on wholesale gas prices (the price company's like British Gas pay for the gas they then sell to us) and force the industry to deliver affordable energy for Britain's poorest.

The consumer watchdog though is unmoved. EnergyWatch warns that unless the government ends what it calls the "toxic" market link between oil and gas prices (oil is used to produce the electricity we use, so too is gas), unless the Competition Commission is ordered to shake-up the way the energy market works, unless suppliers are ordered to offer their lowest prices to their poorest customers (EnergyWatch says the poorest are often charged the highest rates for their energy) then the result will be disastrous. It predicts that another 40% increase in energy prices will leave 6 million households living in fuel poverty (defined as when more than 10% of household income is spent on fuel bills).

There's more evidence today that the housing market slump may prove deeper and more prolonged than many predicted as the number of mortgage approvals plummeted by more than half over the last year. The British Bankers' Association says fewer than 28 thousand loans were made for home purchases in May. That's a 56.1 per cent fall since the same time in 2007 and is the biggest annual fall since records began in 1997. David Dooks of the BBA told Sky News the fall in approvals was largely due to the sharp rise in mortgage rates hitting customers in the wake of the credit crunch in the financial markets. He also told us that "only the re-mortgaging business is holding up, where people need or want to take advantage of deals with other lenders." More worryingly, he expects the mortgage market to remain tough until at least the end of the year.

Sky News producer John Holliday

Poor Gordon Brown. This weekend he was a man on a mission. So much so that he went on a 6,000 mile day trip to Saudi Arabia to try to get oil-exporting nations to release more black stuff from the ground.

But within hours of touching down on terra firma, what happened to the oil price? It jumped, of course, to more than $136 a barrel. Hardly a surprise I guess given that all the PM got was a repeated promise from the Saudi’s to increase output by an extra 200,000 barrels a day. So will anything bring the cost of oil down?

Gordon says the solutions lies in strengthening the global free market and ending “short-term market distortions”. But will browbeating oil producers achieve that? Would it not be easier to get China and India to stop gobbling oil up?

The experts say the only way to reduce our long-term dependence on oil is via more renewable energy projects. By building more wind turbines and solar and hydro-power. But is ‘Going Green’ the right alternative? Let us know what you would do…

Sky News business presenter Emma Crosby

The world’s great and good politics and the oil industry are dusting off their gas-guzzling stretch limos and heading into the desert heat of Jeddah this weekend to see what can be done about the ever-rising price of oil.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s number one oil producer and key figure within OPEC, called this unprecedented meeting. And about time too as political leaders are under fire from voters for not doing enough to curb price rises, while the oil giants and OPEC states are criticised for getting rich as the rest of us struggle to pay our fuel bills.

We can probably expect lots of hand wringing “we feel your pain”, and “high oil prices aren’t in the interest of OPEC states or the oil companies, honest”. Thanks for the sympathy but chat isn’t going to move the price of the black stuff.

What will cool the soaring cost of energy?

Well, prices in New York and London fell quite aggressively overnight on news that China is upping fuel prices by 18%, meaning demand there may fall as petrol and gas become too expensive for some.

So maybe it’s demand rather than supply which the market reacts to. How do we dampen demand? Keep oil prices so high it prices people out of the market? Bring in rationing? Find fuel alternatives or look for ways to change our lifestyle and reduce our dependency on oil?

One thing's for sure, the heat these guys feel in the desert will be nothing to the rising temperature of public outcry if they don’t come up with a radical solution soon.

Sky News business editor Michael Wilson

Not often that the Mansion House Dinner makes it to the front pages – but last night’s uncharacteristically blunt warning from the Governor of the Bank of  England of the seriousness of the slowdown, and the perils of inflation struck a sonorous chord, I suspect, with most households. We are all going to be poorer.

At last one of the guardians of our little kingdom’s money matters has told us something we’ve all known for some time.

And Mervyn King’s warning on wages was timely, given the inflation-busting settlement won by the tanker drivers the day before. If that starts to spark a round of ‘me-too’ claims – and employers don’t have the courage to face them down, then we are back to the 1970’s, and believe me, you don’t want to go there.

But there will be real fights ahead. There’ll be resentment as wage increases fail to match inflation – and remember this is all in the week when inflation rose to its highest level in 15 years.

Here’s Dave Prentis, the general secretary of the public workers’ union Unison – ‘we reached a three year agreement in health (the NHS) at Easter when the Retail Prices Index was much lower than it is now. If prices continue to spiral, that health agreement will be opened and if the Government says we are not going to, then we will take industrial action.’

So we have a toxic mix. Price rises fuelled by basic food and oil costs over which no-one has control, prompting a militancy – and I use that in a non-political way – among the working population as everyone begins to fight their corner into self-destruction.

The most depressing thing about the doom ladled out at last night’s glittering banquet was a very old acquaintance, who’s been in the City for years, who said, after listening to Darling and King, ‘they’ll tell you it’s not like the 70’s, when inflation was well over 20% and so on. It isn’t. It’s worse – this time none of them has any control over the economy. That’s quite a thought, isn’t it?  Sovereign government out of control’.

I truly hope my old friend is very wrong.