Ten perfectly good shopping days to Christmas – plus one less good, scurrying round whatever desperate shops open on Sunday week (Christmas Eve) – and the crystal-gazing season for 2007 is upon us.

Legal & General led the charge yesterday.  You might have thought the crystals were on the murky side this time. The geopolitics of Iraq become more fraught daily. In American politics, the Bush administration looks impotent for the next two years.

In British politics, the Scottish Nationalists are heading for an election victory on an outright independence ticket. Gordon Brown should finally scramble into 10 Downing Street – before anyone has the wit to ban Scots from high office in the rump of England and Wales. His new Chancellor is Ed Balls, author of the disastrous plan to tax pension funds' dividends. Not a promising precedent.

Meantime, the American housing market sags enough to put US home-owners off their mortgage-funded shopping. That is a blow because it is American consumers who have kept the rest of the world humming for the past three years.

Axa ran a survey yesterday indicating that Americans plan to cut their Christmas spending by 19 per cent – and that is before 2007 has started.

At home, those of us not in line for City bonuses face the prospect of pay falling short of a cost of living bolstered by outsize utility bills just as prices of Chinese imports stop falling. Gordon says public sector workers will have to make do with no more than two per cent, little more than half inflation measured by the old Retail Prices Index. Will they strike?

Well, L&G's crystal is altogether brighter. Julien Garran, the chief strategist there, is convinced that American consumers will go on consuming regardless of their housing market. Their pay is rising strongly and the fall in oil prices since August leaves them with spare spending power.

He expects them to deploy more of it on services than on imported goods. So 2007 is the year when service companies come out on top – in Britain, too. That is good for developed countries, bad for emerging markets. And the dollar recovers.

This American resilience will be doubly welcome because the European pick-up may be tailing off – continental mortgage lending has turned down after a three-year boom.

As to Britain, L&G argues that the growing number of people joining the workforce puts us on course for sustained growth without the inflation and interest rates that would have come with it in the past.

L&G still thinks the Bank's official interest rate will have edged up to 5.25 per cent by this time next year. The Footsie-100 will rise by about five per cent to between 6450 and 6550.

The big risk to it all is not Iraq, but a liquidity crisis, a sudden shortage of money – caused, perhaps, by the Chinese ceasing to recycle their export earnings back into US Treasuries.