Is Britain heading for a crash?

With household debt rocketing, repossessions rising, the cost of living spiralling and job cuts on the cards, it's high time to sell out of the UK. Tim Bennett explains how to play falling property prices and the weakening pound, plus the investments that look like a much safer bet.

It was all going so well. The UK economy had been experiencing uninterrupted growth and low inflation for over a decade. And then Northern Rock went bust. At least, that's what Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling would have you believe.

After five months of dithering, the Government is hoping that nationalising the bank will draw a line under the whole sorry saga. But it seems likely that its woes are only just beginning. A protracted battle with aggrieved shareholders lies ahead; EU competition authorities and other banks are likely to take a dim view of the idea of the bank being run as a going concern until a new buyer can be found; but as MPs belatedly realised this week, the Rock's business model depends on it being able to continue to write new mortgages to feed its offshore Granite securitisation vehicle. Shadow chancellor George Osborne put it rather well when he said: "We don't know what we're buying, we don't know how much we're paying for it, and we also don't know how long we're buying it for."

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Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.