What is now underway has been forecast for at least a year on financial blog sites like The Automatic Earth (run by former Canada TODers). If you want the (?last big) holiday of a lifetime and have ready cash (not borrowed money) to hand, do it next year as that may well be the last chance, but doing it in the year just gone would have been better!

As far as buying goods is concerned, in way it's a good time to do it while everything is still available - indeed there are plenty of sales on! But what you should be buying is not "consumer junk", electronics, etc., but durable goods to last you many years if not decades. Again there are plenty of lists available of what you need for the future we are going into - see Sharon Astyk's site which is a mine of information on how to deal with where we are going.

Circumstances changing? Well, just for starters I'd expect UK unemployment to be going up at 100,000 per month in a year's time.