British Government body Consumer Direct has published its annual list of the top ten complaints it’s received. At the head is poor quality used cars. Second is dodgy TVs but third, with 22,172 complaints, is mobile phone service contracts.

Not, you’ll note, phones themselves, but the contracts. The ones designed to lock you in for 18 months or two years.

You might know the feeling. You have a problem with your phone company. You see an offer and ask to change – and they casually tell you that you need to send them £100s to get out of the contract. Is that fair?

Actually it might be. The phone, usually, costs more than you paid. The mobile company therefore charges you a lower amount and spreads the rest of the cost over a contract in addition to the call charges. So yes, they lock you in, but it’s a trade-off for a subsidised phone. (Nobody ever explains this, which is why costs on early termination come as such a shock).

Let me put it another way: 18 months ago I paid £75 or so for my iPhone. The current model is £440 in Tesco. I wouldn’t have paid that. The lower price was what I got in exchange for the frustrating inability to upgrade to the latest model last year.

So, should people be complaining? It’s difficult. Many of the tariffs could certainly be clearer. It would be good if all the companies were forced to disclose how much of a monthly contract goes towards paying off the phone. But if you’d like the flexibility to drop a phone company with a month’s notice or something, fine. Be prepared, though: if that becomes the norm they will start to want the full cost of the phone up front.

And that can be a scary number.

There’s an interesting court case on price fixing coming up in the UK. It involves the old supermarket chain Safeway (now subsumed by Morrisons) and several of its former employees and directors. Essentially Safeway, which no longer trades on the High Street or Internet, is suing its personnel for price fixing. The defendants have asked for the case to be set aside and failed.

Now, I’m not here to say who’s right or wrong in this, I don’t know the details well enough and don’t have the legal competency. I’m also not here to speculate on whether a precedent would have any effect on European law.

Taking the issue away from the specific case, though, price fixing is becoming a serious issue on the Internet and elsewhere. Only last year we had perfume manufacturers preventing individuals selling from their legitimate goods online in certain territories (and look, if I get a bottle of aftershave I don’t like for Christmas I don’t see why I can’t sell it as it’s my property).  We now have a corporation which might – only might – be about to pass the responsibility for wrongdoing onto staff it was supervising at the time.

What I’d really like to see – although I suspect it would be far too straightforward – is some sort of anti-price-fixing commission. Somewhere I as a consumer could go if I felt traders were working together against my interests, and which would be able to take action and remedy the situation.

As I say, probably far too easy and straightforward. But the current situation is getting more and more complex – there really needs to be a clear line of redress for the consumer.

So  the credit agencies are going to start watching our Twitter and Facebook feeds now? It sounds an odd idea but the Creditcards.com website has got hold of a whisper that this will be happening in America. Will it come to Europe?

The principle seems logical enough. If you’re connected to and conversing with loads of people who are profligate and bad credit risks, you’re probably one yourself. If, on the other hand, they’re all good credit risks, you will be as well. Except it’s drivel.

I’m being followed on Twitter by a whole variety of people. They include a few celebrities who probably auto-followed me when I started following them, politicians with whom I’ve exchanged the odd word but mostly public relations executives following me, a journalist. These aren’t people I actually know, mostly. And quite understandably I know even less about their income and spending habits than I know about those of my friends. I’m like that about strangers – completely ignorant.

And now the credit agencies are hinting that they might start examining my ’social’ circle to establish creditworthiness? This is crazy. But if anyone has Donald Trump’s details I might well decide to say hello, it sounds as though it might do me some good.

I also regret the bank bonus tax introduced in the UK and now France this year. Neither of these things is going to make me very popular, but bear with me a second.

Who, really, is going to end up paying these taxes? No, look, I know the bankers will pay them at the point of handing the cash over. But do you actually think these new tariffs will come out of their pockets personally?

No they won’t. No doubt it’ll be dressed up as new value added services but the banks will find a way of passing the costs on to the consumer – that’s you and me, or their business customers. It’s only logical – that’s where the money in the banking system comes from, with the exception of the cash we’ve all ploughed in as investors through our Governments.

This is the other reason I am opposed to a tax on big bank bonuses. Not only will the banks make their bonuses larger – from our money, so we’ll pay the tax back to ourselves – to compensate, but there’s a good argument that says people are earning them.

Take the UK’s RBS. The new chief executive, Stephen Hester, stands to make £9.6 million in bonuses but these are target-led. He has to bring the bank to profitability, such that it can come back to private ownership and pay the UK tax payer back for the bail-out money we spent in 2008/9. He is apparently ahead of schedule according to the plan for achieving this. So if we can get our money back, which goes some way towards repairing the economy, earlier than seemed possible, why are we so opposed to paying handsomely for the services of the people who makes this possible?

Clearly we don’t want to go back to the euphoric but ultimately disastrous recent years of easy credit with no thought of how we’d make the repayments. The whole of the Western World has suffered massively because of this. But attacking the banking system and preventing it from incentivising the best people to get it working properly again is not a sensible answer.

We may be out of recession. The National Institute for Economic and Social Research is saying so. Many commentators said we’d be out of it during the third quarter last year and we weren’t, and the consensus is that when fourth quarter figures come out we’ll be growing again.

It’s an interesting concept, this ‘coming out of recession’. I can easily believe we’re coming out of it but then I’ve never been a Woolworths’ employee, a Zavvi shareholder or worked for any of those other businesses that went AWOL during the worst of it. Recovery or not, they won’t be coming back, although former employees who have yet to find jobs should see some improvement in their prospects.

But there have been benefits to some from the economic downturn, and adjusting to the ‘good times’ if they come back won’t be easy. Last week I bought a pair of jeans in the sales, for example, down by £25 to £35. The bloke at the till looked at them, said ‘I’ll do them for £30’ and sold them to me.

I hadn’t asked for a further discount. You have to ask how bad business has to be before someone starts cutting an already discounted price while I’m actually getting my wallet out – but do I mind the cheaper price? Do I heck. Come to think of it the High Street has had a sale on, permanently, for the last two years or more. Paying full price again is going to be scary. Retailers are going to have to work just a little less hard for our attention.

Employers will notice a difference too. At the moment people are trying hard for jobs. And when they have a job they continue to work hard because another may not be all that easy to come by. Finding the job market better who’s to say they won’t slack off a little, those who have the inclination?

Oh, and people are paying their cards off. Loads of economic commentators say this is bad news; I find it hard to believe that spending our own money rather than someone else’s once we’re out of this is somehow unwise. But I’ll bet, after a few months feeling safe, we’ll be hitting the plastic again.

For some, being told that we’re coming out of recession is a bit like someone who’s trapped under six feet of water being told it’s OK, there’s only five feet now and in another month we’ll be down to four. It’s too late, the business/the house/the car are already forfeit, the trend upwards won’t help in time.

Even for the rest of us – and recession could be a very comfortable place if your personal finances weren’t hit by it – emerging’s going to be a bit of a shock. It looks as though we’re coming out of recession; good luck in managing the recovery.