Shoppers are rushing to buy ... wait for it ... cashmere baby clothes, according to the latest sales report from John Lewis. Champagne and iPods are also flying off the shelves, the retailer tells us. Those who patronise its department stores and Waitrose supermarkets evidently haven't heard the warnings from the doomsters that an economic ice age is just around the corner.

As usual for this time of year, the mood music from the shopping centres and high streets of Britain is a cacophony of confused signals. Ernst & Young's warning yesterday that retailers are discounting harder and earlier is ominous, however. It chimes with the CBI finding earlier this week that retail sales are growing at their feeblest for a year.

Given that taxes and utility bills are up and mortgage bills are still rising for most people, the real surprise is how resilient consumer spending has been. Clues as to why are contained in yesterday's GDP numbers, which show the savings ratio, the proportion of incomes saved, falling from 4 per cent in the second quarter to 3.4 per cent in the third. Consumers have been responding to their dwindling disposable incomes, not by cutting back, but by saving less.

The real story of this slowdown is how reluctant people have been to trim their sails to the harsher economic winds. Plentiful supplies of credit have taken the strain in the past. The key question is how long the willingness to live beyond one's means goes on. The savings ratio soars in difficult times, typically running at 10 per cent or higher.

The return to greater thrift may already be happening. Building societies are reporting a flood of fresh deposits, though it is difficult to strip out the Northern Rock effect to ascertain the underlying trend.

Retailers will learn the truth in the next four days, the big windows in the retail trade's advent calendar. A last-minute rush could still make this a good year; slower footfall could spell disaster. Everything is still to play for. Unfortunately, retailers have not adapted to the growing seasonality by giving out more frequent trading updates. Reliable information will be scarce until the second week in January. Vulnerable retailers have been plagued by adverse rumours.

In such feverish times, the scope for market abuse, insider dealing and false markets is enormously increased. Thousands of senior retail executives and their advisers are party to highly price-senstive information at this time of year.

It may be embarrassing and inconvenient to rush out profit warnings while the cracker-pulling is still going on, but if retailers have bad news to impart, they mustn't delay a day longer than necessary.

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