You could smell the fear at Nokia last week when the Finns called time on breakneck growth in the mobile phone market. The handset manufacturer said that it had given up chasing sales at the expense of profits and that its market share would slip, temporarily.

If that sounds unconvincing, you probably heard it right. Turning up your nose at a price war is a strategy that works only if you are Bentley and the guys slugging it out are Fiat and Ford. Whether it likes it or not, Nokia is a Ford — a mass-market consumer product manufacturer — and what Nokia is not saying is what it could have read in the runes for many months: the consumer electronics racetrack in the West is decelerating into a bumpy ride on the hard shoulder.

Investors have been running scared of Apple for weeks, fearful that the launch of a clutch of new iPod gizmos will not draw in enough punters in December. This is the time of year when the Apples, Sonys and Nokias pile up inventory and hold their breath, hoping that the new whizzy thing, the new shape, colour or just better packaging, will shift the boxes.

This Yuletide the competition for disposable income will be intense as higher fuel, food and credit interest bills crowd out the discretionary gift dollar. In the Far East, giant shears are shredding the profits of billion-dollar chip fabrication plants as overcapacity and slower volumes send the price of computer memory tumbling. It is a regular phenomenon in the boom-bust cycle of the memory chip industry. They built too much plant in the 2006-07 boom and the price of a one-gigabyte flash memory chip, which goes into digital cameras, has tumbled from $8 to $3, causing Moody's last week to deliver a negative rating warning for the Asian semiconductor sector.

Underlying demand for components is not bad, according to Gartner Group, the technology consultancy. Sales of personal computers and underlying demand for memory chips held up remarkably well in the first half of the year. However, the key is not the volumes but where they are coming from. The rising demand for PCs, laptop and mobile handsets is in Asia and Africa and that means a hammer blow for the margins of manufacturers of branded premium products, such as Nokia. It means a continuing search for low-cost assembly and ever-increasing pressure on component suppliers.

Consumer electronics is set for an upheaval. The future is not in the Valley girl clutching a $200 iPhone. It is in the $20 handset sold to a pay-as-you-go customer in Nigeria.

It means reduced profit margins and a shift in the industry's tectonic plates, with generic manufacturers in the Far East seizing control of large swaths of the market. We already have original-design manufacturers, outsourcers who don't just make the mobile phones but design them to specification. These companies will step up to the plate, offering own low-cost brands, filling in cheaply the white spaces on the global mobile-phone map.

Where does this leave the technology leaders? In March, Texas Instruments gave warning of weakening demand for 3G phones from a big customer, said to be Nokia. The retreat to higher-margin ground is not necessarily safe.

Armageddon now

Bring it on, housing Armageddon, the wringing of hands, the shuttered estate agents. Let the bricks crumble and may a great carpet of dust settle on the vendors of ersatz mantelpiece mirrors and upholstered cushions.

Am I alone in resenting this brainless bailout of the mortgage market? The Chancellor of the Exchequer threw a billion of our tax pounds into the drain last week when he cut stamp duty, money he could ill-afford to give away. He will grab it back — less cash for hospitals and schools, and the squaddies in Helmand province can just wait for new boots.

We desperately need this housing collapse, the quicker the better and the sooner it is over. Dear homes are a blight on this land, a vast pit into which lorryloads of cash have been dumped. We buried our wealth in landfill and now the hoard of crumpled banknotes is smouldering, ready to catch fire in a massive, stinking conflagration.

You could see the blight caused by the real estate binge in West Wales last month. A stroll down the rain-sodden main street in Fishguard, a town with little going for it but the ferry to the Irish Republic, revealed several agents advertising dull cottages and ugly bungalows at staggering prices. What hope is there for regeneration and inward investment if the cost of a modest home in a depressed town in Britain's Celtic fringe is £200,000? Who would risk setting up shop at that price?

There is no housing shortage and no mortgage famine. The problem is affordability. What is called mortgage famine is simply lender caution, a sign that banks have remembered that their business is lending money to the solvent, not propping up bad governments by fuelling the lifestyles of fools.

At what rate would you lend for a bungalow in Fishguard? How much skin should the borrower contribute, 10 per cent, 20 per cent of value?

We have been here so many times. Two decades ago, a deposit of 20 per cent was normal and rates were higher. After six years in a flat in South London, I sold it in 1992 for what I paid for it — the price soared by a third and then collapsed, utterly. This is fool's gold. Forget your home — you are worth the value of your next good idea and a hand's turn.

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