Matt

That £111m will be a darn sight higher in the next lot of accounts. Nothing will be fixed until the club addresses the issues around the players on inflated wages signed at the start of the Ashley era: Barton, Smith, Coloccini in particular. Aside from actually paying them out, they distort what other squad members feel they should be paid and what incoming players will demand. The key issue is that the club continues to bleed cash, as it has been doing now for the last 5 years. That overdraft position is horrific at a time of year when most of the season ticket money should already be banked.

I guess what you'd really need is a whole week off work.

The Washington is a great pub. Trying to find a new flat in walking distance. Light Bar should be a great pub, but it isn't. Terrible layout and the flattest, most rancid pints around. Old Street is wierd, some places are OK but at a weekend is full of skinny trendy, daft-haired cuntish types.

The Eurozone can't hack two bailouts. Return of the Deutschmark anyone?

Canny day out, game wasn't up to much.

The comparison with the car salesman is a good one and certainly provides some framing of the morality of the Abacus transaction, given reaction in the US to faulty Toyotas. From Paulson's perspective, he simply made a very good deal. If everyone had made the same deductions as he, then no-one would have been interested in the other side of the deal and therefore no transaction would ever have taken place. If the bonds were certain to default, they would have already been worthless. Despite the dubious intention of GS and the individuals in question, chasing them won't stop this kind of thing happening again. Regulation is still looking slow and ponderous. If you create a system which allows such vast sums to be created in this way then we really should not be surprised that sharp tactics come into play in what is a very competitive arena. The key is protecting investors and the core financial system. I'm don't care much for Lib Dem assertion that investment banking is akin to the spin of the roulette wheel, but I cannot see how insuring these sorts of structures is in any way appropriate for a retail deposit-taking bank (as ABN Amro was/is).

Only been to Frankie and Bennys once, was in Edinburgh and tbh it was alright. Mind you, it's hard to get a calzone wrong. Wetherspoons food is pretty awful, but then you get what you pay for there. Beer and burger is usually decent.

The BNP are delivering their manifesto with a 'St George' figure standing uncomfortably behind Griffin. They can't even do simple things without looking like total numpties.

Spot on. Not sure who would be the obvious replacement, but we'd probably get a few quid for him. Might even get something for Smith. Enrique easily PoY. Consistently a top performer throughout the season.

Get the megabus! 2J I'm planning on meeting a mate of mine who's doing a Masters in Newcastle so not sure whether I'll just meet him at Tilley's or whatever. Tilleys is open at 12 so will probably in there not too long after.

Tilleys pre, Trent post?

The document also lists agents owed money and their addresses, just in case anyone fancies tracking down Willie Mackay

*wash!

Good to see they've shown sufficient insight to prevent banks splitting up and re-inventing themselves as non-banks, but doing the same activities. Sadly this will never was in the US.

This could be very enjoyable.

Errr it was the bankers and financiers that left the country in the state it's in. If you give people the chance to make a fast buck, they'll take it. Doesn't matter if it's dodgy double glazing, 1kg of cocaine or a mythical CDO. Brown lapped up the tax from banks et al for years and completely failed to place any kind of regulation on the industry- it was generating massive tax revenes and helping pension funds backfill their massive funding defecits. He has very much reaped what he has sown. By the way, the Lib Dems have gone very quiet on their 'bash the banks' policy and have as yet, failed to define what they mean by a bank (virtually no mention of it in their manifesto).

The Lib Dem ideas are ludicrous. They've just done the populist view of equating the whole financial sector to "banks" They've not addressed the issue of the general addiction to debt at all levels and the endless drive to increase returns which led to ruin. They've not thought abuot the short-term impact of such a radical change with no lead-in period. Pay is used heavily to motivate- will a large pension fund manager still be rewarded per annual performance? Or are they a bank too now? LInstitutional funds are large shareholders in banks, if they need to get a bigger return on their investment then the banks need to take more risk (which is one of the biggest drivers of the whole crisis). You need to regulate finance as a whole and to do it with global co-operation. Turning the UK's banks into building societies might make nice reading for the man of the people Vinny C, but it wont do much good for the UK until we have something to replace the massive overdependency the UK economy has on a bloated financial services sector.

Keegan's got a very odd Geordie accent, don't you think?

Off there on Saturday, staying over. Not expecting much on the basis of the above!

Still a few tickets going apparently. I'd love to be there myself but it just isn't feasible especially on a Monday evening. Think 50k may be pushing it- any midweek will mean a lot of ST holders can't make it and might not be able to pass on their ticket and the corp areas are even more sparse than normal.

If we go into next season with the same strikeforce we are in deep trouble. Lovenkrands is a sub at best, there are various question marks over Carroll and no-one else is up to the job. It's the absolute number one area to address. If we want to have a fighing chance I think we need to be looking at 5-6 players into the matchday squad at a minimum.

We lack PL-class game-changing players, which they have in Bent and Malbranque. Jones can be a handful too. I wouldn't fancy our chances 11 vs 11 now but I cannot see us going into next season without 1 or 2 decent strikers coming in and some long-awaited attention paid to the centre of the park. A lot can change over the summer months.

Taylor's contract situation will be more of a factor than anything else. What he'd be after will be beyond the scope of the wage bill and cashing in on him is surely too tempting with plenty of suitors lined up.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/ma...rroll-newcastle Hughton's job is to get us promoted. If we'd have had 3 decent strikers on our books then Carroll would have been dropped. We did not have those options. The 'big picture' that our Mackem scribe alludes to is securing promotion. We won't be back into the Premier League on high virtue. Nothing else matters. If Steven Taylor wants to leave because we didn't do something that would have cost us 2 points, well off you go. When it comes to the crunch, it's about going up. No-one is going to remember in 10 years time that there was a dressing room dust-up, all they'll remember is the 'P' next to the league record. Hughton surprised everyone in retaining Carroll for Tuesday, and it paid off. He took a tough decision in the public spotlight (something humdrum regional sports journalists rarely are called on to do). And despite the initial controversy, it's actually been less of a story than it could have been, mainly due to Hughton's blanking of media discussion. 'Surely diminished'? Not a chance. And quite how this whole affair could lead to the manager's eventual replacement for Steve McLaren is beyond me. I'd love to know exactly what this mystical 'chain of events' in Louise's head actually is.

Rarely go on the Times since they pulled their stories off Newsnow. Would usually click an NUFC piece then have a read around.