You might not guess it from the headlines, surveys, statistics and glum mutterings by some shopkeepers, but there is more money around than you might think.
A fair bit of it is coming out of the 64,000 cash machines run by the the LINK network.
Withdrawals from from these holes in machines this month up to Tuesday night totalled £5.782 billion. That is 2.7 per cent up on the first 18 days of December last year - against inflation of 2.1 per cent according to Gordon Brown's chosen Consumer Price Index. True, it is short of the 4.3 per cent inflation measured by the old Retail Prices Index, but not by enough to have retailers weeping into their gin.
The LINK people watch these things closely and insist that in the past, withdrawals from their system have matched trends in shop sales quite closely. One intriguing feature this year is that the withdrawals are rising faster than in December last year. The average daily total for withdrawals is up 8.1 per cent on November, against a 7.8 per cent increase this time last year.
That may not seem huge, but the trend is up, not down. It fits with a picture of shoppers waiting for those whingeing retailers to get on with it and cut their prices.
Then look at John Lewis, which publishes up-to-date weekly sales numbers, which none of the others do. It took a record £101 million last week, 7.7 per cent up on the same week last year and five per cent up on the first week in December, and says this week's sales are running 5.6 per cent ahead of last year.
True, the cold snap is doing wonders for sales of wool jackets and cashmere cardies. True, John Lewis has opened some new stores which may be siphoning some money from the competition.
Still, these are just not numbers that square with any sort of retailing disaster - nor does JL's claim to have sold enough Champagne to fill 10 standard-sized Jacuzzis. Hopefully the buyers will drink the stuff instead.
The US may be another matter. Shops I was required to visit in Florida last week, while my wife celebrated the over-priced pound, did seem singularly quiet. Only the dreaded WalMart was not festooned with "SALE" signs. Ominous news for the Chinese, I thought, and other low-cost manufacturers whose exports are stuck on those shelves.
I may have been wrong. Dr Jerome Booth at Ashmore Investment Management sent me an email yesterday pointing out, among other things, that America's imports account for little more than 3.5 per cent of the world's gross domestic product and that the top eight emerging countries now contribute as much to global growth as all the G7 developed economies together.
He notes that while we have an inter-bank crisis, they are awash with liquidity, boosted by the savings of people who have no welfare state to tide them through old age. Look at the Chinese pumping billions weekly into shares of sub-prime-stricken American banks.
Best not call it a "new paradigm" like the tech share bubble, but the world really is changing.
