Youwon't be able to afford them, you won't be able to borrow the money to buy them, and even if somehow you do, you won't be able to tolerate the abuse from friends and neighbours who have come to despise the
culture that produced such trophy trinkets.

The world is changing. The rot that began last year in the financial world, consigning the apparently all-powerful and impossibly wealthy investment banks of Wall Street to the trashcan of history and turning our own Bank of Scotland from a prince to a pauper, is now an inescapable part of all our lives.

The harbingers of recession are now all around us. Go to the supermarket, any one will do, and note all the blaring signage proclaiming that it is offering the deepest discounts and biggest bargains. That's good we may think. But note also the appearance of unstaffed check-outs where you can pay for your shopping without the help of an assistant and ask yourself how many of the remaining assistants' jobs are going to survive. Because it is only by cutting wage bills that supermarkets can continue to offer us those discounts.

Are we ready for this? Are we ready for unemployment, now at the lowest level for over 30 years, to start rising? Out for a birthday celebration meal in Edinburgh last week, a city which has boomed on the back of burgeoning financial services, it did not seem to me that we were. The restaurant was packed. Fine wines were being consumed by the crateload. We were gently cajoled to swallow our coffee quickly and make way for an impatient queue. Walking back to Waverley Station, the pubs were busy. Youngsters were forming noisy packs outside nightclubs. And this was a Wednesday, not a Friday or Saturday night.

Walking home from the station, I passed a road of recently-built four– and five-bedroomed houses. There are four "For Sale" signs begging for attention at the end of the road. They have been there for months. The following night, I heard a story about one of them. The owners, I was told, had hoped to get £450,000 for it. They turned down an offer of £439,000. It is now on sale for a fixed price of £400,000.

Falling house prices are perhaps the least of the pains we will have to endure. The extent and depth of the recession now beginning to afflict Europe and North America mean that factories will close, shops will shut, offices will put out the lights, and restaurants will upend the chairs on tables for the last time. In Scotland, tens of thousands will lose their jobs.

In the 1980s, Scottish unemployment reached 350,000 compared to 78,000 today on the equivalent measure. Perhaps the increase in dole-seeking numbers may be in the hundreds of thousands. Are we prepared for that? Do we understand the hardship that being on the dole brings? Or the insecurity that will plague those who manage to keep their jobs?

One thing is sure. The new jobless are going to be very angry. They will feel that it is not their fault, that they were providing things or services that people wanted and appreciated and now, because of the irresponsibility of some greedy bankers, their livelihoods have gone. It isn't quite as simple as that (actually everyone shares some of the blame after the borrowing spree of the past decade), but in hard times, simplicities tend to be what people cling to.

Politicians, whose careers depend on keeping pace with public moods, have cottoned on to that. Gordon Brown has condemned the "age of irresponsibility" and blasted "elements" of the financial industry's bonus system as "unacceptable". Across the political spectrum in Conservative ranks, normally staunch defenders of the capitalist system and its warts, George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, has demanded that there should be no bonuses for "those who took their banks to the edge of bankruptcy".

This is the new Puritanism, replacing grudging tolerance of excessive reward with implacable intolerance, displacing grumbling acceptance of the easy acquisition of wealth with outright hostility, and demanding punishment of those who break this new moral code.

With the disappearance of easy credit, new Puritanism is going to have to be the model, not just for the financial industry, but for all of us as well. Banks will have to revert to the traditional model where lending is much more dependent on the assets they hold, such as deposits, than on the wholesale money markets. You and I will have to learn that we can no longer splash out using the credit card or a bank loan obtained in a trice over the telephone, or by extending the mortgage. Our spending needs to be much more dependent on the money we actually have than on borrowing what we don't have.

The new Puritanism means rediscovering the principles of Charles Dickens' Mr Micawber: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery."

In some ways this mood – being responsible rather than irresponsible, conserving rather than discarding, being prudent rather than profligate – has been coming for some time. The SNP Justice Minister, Kenny MacAskill, has been blasting away at the abuse of alcohol, berating supermarkets for "irresponsible" cheap booze promotions, puritanically demanding separate alcohol sales areas dubbed the "check-outs of shame" by the tabloid media and, with all the righteousness of a pulpit fulminator, trying to ban 18- to 21-year-olds from being able to buy drink at off-licences.

Less controversially, but in the same vein, we have all got used to sorting tins, bottles, plastics and paper from our rubbish and recycling it. As the price of oil soared, we suddenly learned the real cost of being profligate with the planet's resources. And, perhaps for the first time since environmentalists started banging this drum, we also learned that saving the planet also meant real savings in our pockets. The price of oil may now be falling dramatically, but it is a puritanical lesson that will stick.

All over Scotland, people like you and me are suddenly being a lot more careful with their money and trying to hoard it rather than spend it. This, like drinking a lot less and recycling newspapers instead of sending them to landfill, may seem a good thing. But that is small comfort on the edge of the recessional black hole that is starting to swallow the rest of the economy.

Pass by a car saleroom and note the salesmen pacing about or nervously twiddling their thumbs. New car sales in Scotland in August were a fifth lower than a year ago and were the lowest for 42 years. The General Motors factory on Merseyside which makes Vauxhall Astra cars and vans – Britain's most popular vehicle – is closing its doors for two weeks this month to avoid being stuck with a traffic jam of unsold vehicles.

That means a lot of supplier companies, who make tyres, light bulbs and windscreens. will also have to cut back which in turn means no income to support jobs.

This slowdown in vehicle sales is not just because people have suddenly decided to hang on to their old car a bit longer. It is also because a lot of people who do want a new vehicle have suddenly found out that either they cannot borrow the money or the borrowing cost is too expensive.

In many towns and cities, there are sites filled with the rubble of outdated buildings from which 21st century townscapes were supposed to be built. Now, like second world wartime bomb sites, these rubble-strewn landscapes are destined to remain that way for years to come, physical testaments to the ruination brought by this financial crisis.

And if you are appalled that your mortgage interest rate seems to be heading up from five to 7%, because no discount deals are available, spare a thought for small businesses, most of whom depend on overdrafts to see them through ups and downs. They are finding out that their bank has hiked their overdraft interest rate from about 12% to 16%.

And if that small business is a bar or a restaurant, that extra cost plus the reduced income from customers who have decided to stay at home rather than eat or drink out, will be the death knell.

Almost everywhere you look, shrapnel from the financial system implosion is causing casualties. There are between 1.5 to two million Scots nearing retirement who were assuming that their private pension was going to cushion their old age. Now, almost in the blink of an eye, their pension pot has shrunk and many are waking up to the shock of discovering they are going to have to work a few more years yet. If their job survives, that is, and if they can see off competition from younger jobless people.

All this will pose immense strain on society. We are not good at coping with these problems. Glasgow, with huge number of people on incapacity benefit (where jobless people were shunted by a Conservative Government anxious to keep official unemployment numbers down) still bears the scars of 1980s de-industrialisation.

Some of the problems will be immediate. If the £50bn part-nationalisation of the banks is all taken up, that will have to be financed by increased government borrowing, further swelling the already swollen national debt. Recession will increase the unemployment benefit bill and reduce tax revenues from income, VAT, and corporation taxes. Company taxes, which have been boosted in recent years by big bank profits, will be badly hit.

All that implies the return of a dilemma that faced Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s: should taxes be raised or public spending cut? And in the meantime, trade union leaders, – especially of public sector workers – are eyeing another grim statistic: the rise in inflation. While the retail price index fell a little from 5% to 4.8% in August, the consumer price index (which excludes housing costs) rose from 4.4 to 4.7%.

It cannot be too long before demands for 5% pay rises (just to keep pace with inflation you understand) get posted, accompanied by rhetoric that may well strike a popular chord: if the Government can afford £500bn to bail out rich bankers, it can surely afford to give a nurse or a social worker a few quid a week. The claim is fatuous, but you can already see it being posted by individuals on almost any newspaper e-comment bulletin board. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling will have to keep their nerve because the bank rescue package is going to mess up Government finances for years to come.

By how much is hard to know. The rescue package appears to be based on the 1991 Swedish bail-out. During a global economic downturn and a national property price crash, two Swedish banks became insolvent and five of the six big banks experienced difficulties. The Swedish government offered emergency loans and took shareholdings in order to shore up the bank's capital. Over a four-year period, according to an International Monetary Fund study, the recapitalisation cost 1.49% of Swedish GDP, the cost to the taxpayer was 3.6% of GDP and the overall output loss to the economy was 30.6% of GDP.

Translating these numbers into a British context, it suggests bank recapitalisation will cost British taxpayers £21bn, the cost in taxes having to be diverted to the bank rescue to be £50.8bn, and the loss of output in the economy to be £431bn. And that, according to the IMF study, would be cheap, because the average costs of the 42 banking crises it looked at were (apart from output costs) about four times higher. Do the maths yourself and weep.

To soften this, Brown and Darling are trying to reassure (themselves more than us, I think) that the British economy has the strength to weather the storm, based largely on employment figures at record highs. There is some truth in that, but it ignores the problem of how we got into this mess in the first place – a vast ballooning bubble of credit that has now gone pop.

Lulled into complacency by years of low inflation, low interest rates and steady growth (which we all thought were good things), and fuelled by a vast expansion of credit availability through such things as Wall Street's securitisation of mortgages, we have borrowed, borrowed and borrowed again.

In the last 10 years, personal debt in Britain (everything owed in loans, credit cards and mortgages) has mushroomed from £570bn to £1,510bn, more than the wealth produced annually (about £1,400bn). Add in company debt, and the bill rises to about £3,200bn.

On my rough calculations, personal debt in Scotland is about £25,000 for every man, woman and new-born infant. And the assets against which the debt is secured – houses mainly – are falling in value and the means of paying off the debt – incomes for the most part – are going to come under pressure.

Although we may be presently comforting ourselves that we did not have the worst excesses of sub-prime mortgage selling that occurred in America, and we are not (so far) experiencing the dramatic collapse in property prices occurring in some parts of America, our debt problem is actually much bigger. Compared to America, British private sector debt has risen two and half times faster in the last decade.

It means that unless interest rates come down even more than they did last week, keeping up with debt repayment will pose big problems for companies and householders. New Puritanism is here with a vengeance. Spending will have to be pruned back drastically and financial efforts focused on paying back all that borrowing. Puritanism is the new black. And economically speaking, it really is black.