The UK may already be in recession. Some economists believe the slowdown will last all through next year - which would add up to the worst recession since the war.

Houses

The average value of a home, according to the Nationwide, is down £23,000 from its peak last year. Property values are down 12.4% on a year ago, the largest annual fall ever recorded by the mortgage lender.

There is plenty of evidence, however, that in some places, prices have fallen far more dramatically.

How low are prices going? There is plenty of room for more falls. Property prices are still more than 60% higher in real terms than they were at the start of the decade. The gloomiest predictions are for houses to lose 35% from their peak, which means another £40,000 could be wiped off the average house price.

Banks

Jobs have gone at every investment bank in the City and the clearout is just beginning. The banking crisis has widened to the high street banks, and there will be many thousands more redundancies across the UK, as ordinary tellers pay the price for highly-paid traders' losses.

Two thousand staff have been axed at Northern Rock and many thousands more will go at Bradford & Bingley, Alliance & Leicester and as a result of the takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB.

The look of the UK's high streets will change. Instead of multiple bank branches there will be just four big players, lending less money and being far more choosy about who they do business with.

There will be less competition and current accounts will become more expensive.

Stockmarket

The FTSE 100 has fallen 25% in the last year. The least-publicised crash in share prices can be seen in the mining sector. Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Anglo American and Xstrata - four of the world's biggest commodity companies - have seen their stockmarket values roughly halve in the past four months.

This is because the prices of almost all industrial metals are falling. Lower orders from US factories is one reason. But it seems the market's faith in China's ability to sustain the commodities boom is also waning.

Unemployment

The Labour Force Survey measure, joblessness rose 81,000 to 1.72 million between May and July, the highest level since 1999. The data also showed a 71,000 jump in the number who had left the workforce because they could not find a job.

Those numbers don't even include job losses in the City, which will take a few more months to hit the figures, or in construction, which is a sector in meltdown.

How many more will be visiting the Job Centre soon? Predictions are for another 300,000 - to 2 million - by Christmas, after what one expert called an "avalanche" of autumn job losses.

Inflation

The nightmare for the Bank of England would be that the high inflation of recent months, caused by previous rises in oil and commodity prices, pushes through into wage inflation, making it difficult for it to cut interest rates to ward off recession. Fortunately, so far there is little sign of that happening. Wage growth has been very benign as inflation has risen and experts say it will be pressured downwards by rising joblessness in the coming months.

Manufacturing

For the past year or so the Bank of England has been hoping that industry would take over from the flagging consumer as the main driver of the economy.

With manufacturing having shed a million jobs in the past 10 years and with its output having not grown in all that time, it now only accounts for around 14% of the economy so even if it recovered strongly, there are limits to how far it could counterbalance recession in the far larger services sector, which accounts for more like 70% of economic output.

Manufacturing, far from helping the economy recover, has tumbled back into recession, soon to be joined by retailing, the services sector and construction.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk