Consumers appear loth to spend. Is it a blip, or Brexit beginning to bite?

Usually dire retail predictions turn around by Christmas, but this year things feel different, with real incomes falling, prices up and borrowing highEconomists tend to be sniffy about the CBI’s distributive trades survey – the one that this week reported the “steepest drop” in retail sales since the depths of the recession in 2009. The report describes only a two-week snapshot of trading, they say, and thus is volatile and unreliable. The size of the sample is too small,