1/ BBC news: UK unemployment ‘will peak at 2.8m’ in 2010: Report on the latest forecast from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

2/ Financial Times: UK suffers a decade of weak expansion: UK gross domestic product, on average, rose by 1.7 per cent annually in real terms throughout the so-called noughties, Britain’s weakest period of economic expansion of any since the 1940s

3/ Guardian: British homeowners continue to trim mortgage debt: Britons reduced their outstanding mortgage debt by £4.9bn during the third quarter of the year, figures from the Bank of England showed today

4/ Guardian: The global economy’s decade of debt-fuelled boom and bust: Larry Elliot argues that borrowing was both the shaky foundation of global growth and the cause of its collapse