Who would be a saver? After 33 consecutive months of UK interest rates being pegged at a record low of 0.5 per cent, it now appears that there’s no relief on the horizon for the financially prudent.

In wealth management firm Williams de Broe’s annual review of investment themes for the coming year, Vision 2012, the group’s head of research Jim Wood-Smith warns that UK rates will remain at or around their current very low levels for many years, “possibly running into decades.”

As a result of this state of affairs, savings incomes are likely to be below the rise in the cost of living for the majority of the country’s population.

In such a volatile economic climate, it’s easy to forget that there’s still tens of thousands of households out there who have not joined in the spend, spend, spend party which has left much of the rest of the population drowning in debt.

It’s largely a generational divide, with the 60s baby boomers stuck slap bang in the middle. Credit cards were largely unheard of until the late 1950s, but a new way of financial life was born in the USA, the homeland of most modern phenomena.

By 1970 mass unsolicited mailings known as “drops” in banking terminology had to be outlawed in the US because of the financial chaos caused by their sudden availablity to the unemployed, drunks, narcotics addicts, compulsive debtors and the like.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, Barclaycard had launched the first credit card outside of the US in 1966.