Our credit cards are at their limits, our accounts overdrawn, and our houses mortgaged to the hilt. Yet even before we've digested the turkey and unwrapped our last presents, millions of us are heading for the sales, desperate to buy, buy, buy.

Publishers love the month after Christmas. Fresh from weeks of over-indulging on food and credit cards, a great throng invades bookshops for advice on losing weight and getting out of debt in what constitutes the largest - and ultimately fruitless - mea culpa on earth. While I can't predict what the scales will tell, I can say with absolute certainty that this year most Britons will have found themselves in more debt than ever. How do I know this? Not because of Christmas - the gifting thing has been a tradition for at least a couple of thousand years now, and there's no record of the three wise men having to go on a "debt diet" - but because easy credit, American-style, has landed on British shores, and the consequences of this invasion are as predictable as the opening of yet another Starbucks.

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