Web Week: A review of the top stories of the week

'Why is everyone so bloody miserable?', asked Transport Minister Tom Harris (pictured) this week. He claimed Britons should appreciate their relative wealth, saying our spending would have 'made our parents gasp'.

Readers were unimpressed by the financial lecturing a day after Chancellor Alistatir Darling pleaded with workers to accept low pay settlements depsite being squeezed by rising prices. Mr Darling wants us to grin and bear it. Mr Harris wants us to grin and compare it.

His comments were insensitive to cash-strapped and over-taxed families, but they reflect the mood. Polls on This is Money forecast a bleak year: oil will hit $200 a barrel this year while interest rates climb from 5% to 5.5% or 6%; inflation will nearly double to 6% by next summer and property prices will fall further than during the early Nineties crash.

Mr Harris calls it pessimism but readers of financial newspaper pages and websites call it caution. TiM readers, for example, typically started a pension aged 20 to 25, have more than £50,000 in savings accounts and clear their credit card balances each month. Caution has helped them focus on their finances. A little more of it would have helped us all avoid the crunch.

Other top stories this week included news that inflation rose from 3% to 3.3% in June, that some Brits are coping with the credit crunch and how a care-free Michael Winner is coping with £6m debts. That helped lift the gloom.

- Andrew Oxlade, Editor, This is Money.co.uk

(This post also appears as a column in Financial Mail on Sunday)

1. No rate cut for a year as inflation hits 3.3%
2. How to survive the credit crunch, by Michael Winner
3. Brits shaking off credit crunch worries
4. Minister tells boom generation to cheer up
4. House price slump to last four years
5. Fixed mortgage rates hit ten-year high
6. Kings grim warning on pay and bills
7. 'My husband moved our money in secret'
8. Halifax offers stunning '12%' on savings
9. Cautious savers inherit the wealth
10. Card limits frozen - even for the wealthy
11. NS&I: The sure-fire way to beat inflation
12. Hundreds added to the cost of a holiday
13. Sunday newspaper share tips
14. Pay rises have fallen behind inflation
15. 10 accounts to keep your money safe
16. Housebuilders hit by gazundering
17. Ten essential tips for buying homes abroad
18. Airline surcharges: are they just a rip-off?
19. How's this for a £75 council flat
20. Newspaper and magazine share tips
21. Gieve sacrificed by Whitehall spinners to bury bad news
22. Savers in limbo over Isa transfer delays
23. Inflation and petrol fears as oil price soars
24. Spreading risk in fund-of-funds pays off
25. Driving holidays: Spain is Europe's bargain