But while mainland Europe struggles to find work, over in the United Kingdom we're basking in record employment. The latest unemployment figures show that just 1.41 million people are out of work.

So what's the secret of our success?

Credit cards.

That's right. All the French government needs to do is issue the French with as many credit cards as there are circulating in the UK and spending will boom. Unemployment would be halved overnight.

In the UK, there are 67 million credit cards in use. France with a similar population can boast of less than three million.

Imagine the difference an extra 64 million credit cards and all that spending power could make to the French economy?

Let's just hope they keep issuing them here in ever greater numbers to keep the UK's "economic miracle" rolling onwards.

Renting a property when you could buy it is like throwing money down the drain.

The argument goes that rather than pay rent to someone else for a property you will never own, you could pay a mortgage and eventually own the property yourself.

But does that hold true today? Well, according to The Economist, no.

In its latest survey of the world property market, it argues that in many countries it is now cheaper to rent property than to buy it. And that's because house prices are at record levels in relation to rents in the USA, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain, Holland, Ireland and Belgium.

As an example it cites a two bedroom flat in London that will cost you £450,000 to buy today or £1,700 a month to rent. Taking into account mortgage payments, maintenance and insurance costs, someone buying the property would pay £12,600 more in the first year of occupancy than someone renting it.

The reason we are now in a position where it is cheaper to rent than to buy is simple. Wages.

Wages haven't been going up anywhere near as fast as house prices. In fact the Institute Of Fiscal Studies says that average incomes actually FELL in the UK last year.

Rents are very closely linked to wages. People will only be able to pay what they can afford. So rent increases tend to be inline with wage increases.

Mortgages however aren't as closely linked to wages as you might first think. We base our judgement on whether or not we can afford to buy a house not on the price it is on the market for, but how much the monthly repayments are going to cost.

With interest rates at historically low levels in recent years in both the UK and around the world, we were able to afford to buy houses with bigger price tags. And, that's just as well because the more we can borrow - thanks to lower interest rates, relaxed lending - the higher house prices rise.

We are now at a point however where the cost of renting is significantly less than the cost of buying.

And if interest rates rise, not only will house buyers suffer for the record levels of borrowing that they have chalked up in recent years, but the amount we can afford to repay each month will fall - and house prices will do the same.

With house prices back at sustainable levels, conventional wisdom might well hold true once again.

"The sheer scale of consumer debt has made millions of households extremely vulnerable to shocks in the economy, both from fiscal mismanagement and external factors such as oil price rises, acts of terrorism and wars," says the report. "A downturn in the economy would create serious economic and social problems for the 15 million people who struggle with debt repayments."

That's not news to many of us. Nor is it a problem that is unique to the UK. From the USA to Australia, we live in societies funded by an ever increasing apetite for borrowing.

Of course debts need to be repaid. And so does interest charged on borrowing. Those that claim that low interest rates mean there has never been a better time to borrow never mention that equally low inflation rates mean that the cost of borrowing is not as low as it may seem.

The debt mountain is really a house of cards and any of of countless factors could trigger its collapse.

And we have never been in this position before. Nobody really knows what will happen if the cards come tumbling down. But you can guarantee it isn't going to be pretty.

One of the biggest casulaties will be the housing market.

Prices have been rising so fast for so long now that many people cannot believe they can ever fall.

The Japanese believed the same until 1990. At the end of 1989, the Nikkei index reached almost 40,000. Japanese property was worth four times as much as all the property in the USA, with speculation in further rises in prices driving the market. Borrowing was totally out of control, with 100 year mortgages being introduced to satisfy Japanese demand for bigger and bigger loans.

And then the bubble burst.

Today, 15 years later, the Nikkei stands at less than 12,000.

Property prices have fallen year after year for a decade.

Will we be the next Japan?

I've been looking for royalty free photographs to use on websites and after searching around I found a website offering what I was looking for.

Access to the images was via paid membership, with access ranging from a week to a year So I filled in all my details, clicked the payment button and . . . reached a page that said there was a fault and that my order couldn't be processed at that time.

No explanation, no details of who to contact to report the fault and nothing to say that the company was even aware of the problem.

I tried several times later that day, but still got the same fault message.

So I emailed the support address. That was three days ago and I'm still waiting for a reply.

Meantime, a friend who knew the type of images I was looking for had come across a website offering some that he thought would interest me. In fact he had copied a sample image and attached it for me to see. It was perfect and so I hot footed it over to istockphoto.com to discover that the image I wanted to use would cost me a dollar.

One dollar.

True, I would have to sign up and buy a minimum of ten one dollar credits, allowing me to download and use ten images, but that was no problem. I needed other images anyway and found dozens that I could use.

Except for one.

The one that my friend had emailed me.

He hadn't noted the reference number or indeed how he found it in the first place, and no matter how many searches I made and how many pages I looked through this one image was nowhere to be found.

I really wanted that photo so I sent an email with it attached to istockphoto.com's Helpdesk. I explained that it had been sent to me by a friend and that I really wanted to use it, but just couldn't find it on the istockphoto.com website.

To be honest, I didn't expect much joy. Out of the thousands of photos that the company offers, I didn't expect anyone at a helpdesk to instantly recognise it. And seeing as I wasn't even a customer and the photo was worth a dollar's business, I couldn't see anyone spending time searching the database for it. Not for long anyway, and I'd conducted all of the obvious searches myself.

But I was wrong.

A few hours later I got a reply from istockphoto.com, thanking me for contacting them and providing me with a direct link to the image I wanted.

To istockphoto.com, a dollar customer is obviously important.

This one dollar customer will now be spending a few more dollars with them. Maybe hundreds over the coming years. And I hope that if you are looking for images from a company that values your business, then you'll soon be doing the same.

With consumer debt now past the trillion pound mark, a small interest rate hike, illness, the loss of a job, even divorce, could spell financial disaster for thousands more.

It's no longer enough for politicians and lenders to say such debt is "manageable" because of low unemployment and the lowest interest rates in decades. The reality is that the debt timebomb is ticking ever louder.

Or do you want to know what the house next to the one you're interested in sold for last October?

Now you can find out the actual price paid for any house in the UK going back as far as 2000 at nethouseprices.

The service is completely free of charge and there is no need to register either.

Where better then for Morgan Stanley's Chief Economist Stephen Roach to publicly declare his belief that the world economy is in danger of ending up in deep freeze.

He told a meeting at the Davos World Economic Forum that US consumers were using their houses as "massive ATM machines", borrowing money against rising prices and spending it like there was no tomorrow.

This appetite for borrowing is being fed by loans at interest rates of just 1%, with much of the money being spent on imports, thereby funding the world economy. At the same time, foreign countries had been buying US dollars to keep their currencies cheap against a dollar in freefall, thereby funding the cost of the US government's massive budget deficit.

"This is an utterly insane way to run the world economy," Stephen Roach said. "You know that, we know that, but the Federal Reserve is in denial about it."

When the US Central Bank is forced to raise interest rates "the music stops" as Roach puts it.

Roach is a well known pessimist, but even economic optimists like Jacob Frenkel of insurance giant AIG are agreeing with him this time.

When the music stops make sure you aren't one of the ones left standing without a seat.

The Halifax defined a town as unaffordable if house prices were more than 4.37 times the average salary and house prices in 548 out of the 597 main UK postal towns surveyed were beyond the means of people on average salaries according to the study.

Not surprisingly first time buyer numbers are at their lowest level since 1981.

America's "economic miracle" has been financed by such debt.

Car buyers in the States can pay for their cars over as much as seven years - many owe more on their car than it was ever worth.

Usually times of economic prosperity signal a reduction in debt. But not this time. In fact economic growth has been fueled by the ability to borrow ever increasing sums of money, both in the USA and elsewhere in the world including the UK.

It's an unsustainable way of life that gets scarier by the day.

Under the current system in the USA, workers pay 6.2% of their monthly salary into the social security system and are paid out a weekly allowance, the equivalent of our state pension, when they retire.

But the money someone pays into the system isn't put aside for future use. There is no pot of money with your name on it from which to draw a pension you've paid for.

Instead the money used to pay those already entitled to receive the pension.

Such a system works well when more or as much money is being paid into the system as is being paid out, but in the best tradition of pyramid schemes, that's not going to be happening for much longer.

At a time when America's expanding elderly population expanding elderly population are placing greater demands on the system, fewer people are paying into it.

Bush's message to the American people was blunt.

"If we do not act now, government will eventually be left with two choices: dramatically reduce benefits or impose a massive economically ruinous tax increase."

Lower benefits. Higher taxes. And knowing how good governments are with our money, probably both.

You don't have to read between the lines here.

When it comes to financing retirement, it's now every man for himself.

In its quarterly economic review, Deloitte said the UK economy had enjoyed a "golden period" during the past decade, but it had been achieved by creating major imbalances in the economy. Imbalances that could spell trouble for the future.

"Although 2005 may not be the year when things go completely wrong, it will probably mark the start of a more difficult period for the UK economy," Deloitte's chief economic advisor Roger Bootle said.

Rather than the opposites that they are often portrayed as, capitalism and communism are merely two sides of the same coin. Both tied to an industrialised world and both dependent on wage slavery for their survival. The Soviet Union may have fallen first, but that doesn't mean that the United States of America is sitting pretty.

In fact when you look at the economic data, you wonder how the USA is still in business. And if it wasn't for the absolutely huge consumer debt that has been rung up over the last decade it probably wouldn't be.

Household debt in the USA is now equal to 85% of the US economy. But even that figure is dwarfed by the money America will need to start finding when 78 million baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 in the post-war population boom — start to retire. They will start to qualify for Social Security benefits in 2008 and Medicare from 2011.

USA Today said in October last year that American taxpayers "have a hidden debt of at least US$53 trillion in government obligations, mostly from Medicare, Social Security and the federal debt. This debt equals $473,456 per household, dwarfing the $84,454 in personal debt per household owed for mortgages, car loans and other borrowing.

Either that money will have to be found from somewhere or operations aren't going to happen, pensions aren't going to be paid and retirement is going to have to be postponed indefinitely.

And what about the USA's record trade deficit - the gap between what the USA imports and what it exports?

In December 2004 it smashed the US$60 billion mark.

To finance this, America has to borrow US$2.6 billion in cash every day. The equivalent of 80% of the entire world's net savings every single day.

If you can imagine 80% of the world's net savings disappearing in a single day, that's how much goes in to propping up the US economy on a daily basis.

Can this continue much longer? You don't need to be an economist to guess no.

But if you want to hear from an economist, here's one.

Enter Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley. In a private meeting with fund managers, he said that the USA was facing "Economic Armageddon".

Roach believes that America's record trade deficit will mean that the dollar will keep falling. If it does, the only way America will be able to encourage foreigners to buy treasury bills and help plug the financial blackhole, and prevent a rise in inflation, is if the Federal Reserve increases interest rates. And if interest rates go up, consumers who are heavily in debt will pay the price big time.

You don't even want to begin to imagine the fallout that this would have on the world economy as a whole.

And how likely is this to happen?

Roach sees a 30% chance of a slump soon and a 60% chance that "we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual Armageddon."

The chance of avoiding Economic Armageddon? According to Roach, just one in ten.

During 2005, the Get Out While You Can website will devote itself primarily to the failings of our wage based society and our dependence on debt to fuel our lifestyles. If property prices do fall or other events impact the economy in the next year or so, there should be plenty of material to cover.

Despite my bearish outlook on the macro economic picture, I am very confident that the opportunities to leave behind a lifetime of wage slavery will only grow in the years ahead. As will the demand for such opportunities.

And so I am also about to relaunch entrepreneur.co.uk.

Those who have enquired about Get Out While You Can membership during the last few months will be pleased to read that I will be reviewing all of the members only content on this website and will be making the most relevant and valuable information available over at entrepreneur.co.uk where access to it will be free of charge.

Almost all of the experts agreed that their would be a "correction" in UK property prices in 2005, with house price falls having a knock on effect to dampen consumer spending. Some talk of 20-30% falls in some area over the next two or three years.

Only a fool and the most optimistic of estate agents would argue that house prices can continue to outstrip wages at the alarming rate they have done so in recent years.

There is no doubt that this property bubble has been fueled by lenders falling over themselves to "give" people money, but even with extended borrowing, more and more people are finding it impossible to afford the seemingly never ending price rises.

That's why the market stalled towards the end of 2004 and that's why we have all this talk about property prices falling in 2005. And as soon as we start talking about falling house prices, people are wary of buying at what they see as the top of the market. And as prices fall people still hold back, hoping for further falls. And that's when the bubble goes bang.

If the bang is loud enough a lot of people will find themselves in deep financial trouble.

They will be paying mortgages on houses that are no longer worth what they paid for them. They will be repaying loans on remortgages based on a valuation of a property that no longer holds true. They may also find themselves out of a job if house price falls affect High Street spending.

This property bubble has been allowed to grow and grow because the government was and is unwilling and unable to take decisive action to stop it.

The main tool for cooling property prices would be an increase in interest rates, but our economy today is fuelled by debt and a substantial increase in interest rates would put up the cost of servicing that debt, reduce consumer spending and send the country into recession.

They no doubt hoped that the market would cool of its own accord, but that didn't happen. Not until the bubble has grown to a size that threatens the economic prosperity of the country anyway.

The next few years could prove very difficult financially for many people in the UK. Let's just hope the worst fears of the economists aren't realised.