The Guardian: "Welcome to The Great Stagnation"

"Spending by consumers is being consistently depressed by low or zero wage growth, while prices have continued to rise"

Link to The Guardian

"Barclaycard doesn't just see the data from millions of credit card purchases. It also sees around one third of all payments made every day in the British economy through its merchant services, so it probably has a better feel for the state of the British economy than the Office for National Statistics.

"Unfortunately, it's not good reading. Spending by consumers is being consistently depressed by low or zero wage growth, while prices have continued to rise. Normally, spending shows a rise in November, ahead of Christmas. But it didn't happen last year, it seems. This year, whatever optimistic economists might say about 'the green shoots of recovery', it's not showing up in Barclaycard's figures, which reveals that spending is flat, at best.

"The good news is that we're not taking on more debt, even though our wages are down and prices are up. A less benign interpretation is that economic confidence is so low that few of us think we can spend now and hope to pay it off later."