Verbal

Can you please supply the peer-reviewed scientific references to back up this assertion?

This thread fails the high standards of the Lounge. It and the addressees look more Muppet to me.

What does this mean and how is it relevant?

Are you saying that it's routine ('all the time') that players are induced to walk away from their contracts while their clubs are in administration and attempting to put together a CVA? Can you give an example?

The government's move on house prices may seem odd, given the generally agreed over-valuation of property. But property collapses have been at the heart of all the major triggers of economic recession (and possibly depression) since 2008. The US property collapse in 2008 exposed massive over-lending to people who couldn't afford it (and the use of derivatives to conceal this problem), and when they all defaulted, the banking system was exposed as a ruin in in need of 100s of billions of dollars of federal guarantees. Exactly the same has happened in Spain (other debt levels are actually much lower there) and Ireland. Both countries are now littered with abandoned houses and incomplete housing-estate ghost towns. The government no doubt wouldn't mind gentle falls in house prices, but any collapse would put yet more pressure on British banks. Of course, the way Osborne has gone about it may only stoke the bubble.

Historically, an awful lot of debt simply isn't paid back. It is just the way the world works. For example, the Canadian railway system was built on unpaid debt. More recently, the fibre-optic networks in the US were financed by the dotcom bubble, and loans turned bad. And I repeat: you can't think of national debt like family debt. Governments can print money. You can't (or can you?).

It would be amazing if the Football League, having won in court the right to retain the Football Creditors' Rule, then allowed a member club to subvert it so blatantly.

You're drifting as ever off the point. Read Dune's original little gem - my response was to that: the idea that you can't have fiscal union without political union, and that means 'dominance from a centralised base'. The US has fiscal union with constitutional checks and balances between federal and state governments, and there are constant tensions between the two (hence the immigration controversy, to give a present-day example). The whole Tea Party movement is about states' rights over the feds.

My point being, Ducky, that the US is riven by the same kinds of tensions as the EU. ''States' Rights" has been a hot-button legal issue since the American Civil War, and states in the South especially still fiercely guard their distance from the Federal government.

The entire world economy has always been, is and always will be in debt. It doesn't work like a family household, and it would be disastrous if it did. If all personal, corporate and sovereign debt were to be cancelled overnight it really would be the end.

You've never heard of the United States then.

Calm down, calm down. This is a Dog thread, remember.

This does not make sense. You can only 'commit a serious crime' if you are convicted. You need to read some Orwell.

I thought you were one.

Isn't this from next year?

Stripes can also make you look HUGELY fat. Just ask Alpine.

You can't out-god god.

That article makes no sense whatsoever.

Here's one from The Times today, under the headline 'Saints March Together': 'The second youngest player at Euro 2012 and the second oldest outfield player...are both former Southampton players who could meet on Friday.'

If you want to play 'political point the finger' then yes, Labour should have done something about it, as should the Major government before it. If you want to figure out how it all began, why it still persists, and how possibly to get out of it, then you have to go back to the rise in the mid-70s of the Chicago School. These ideas are still very much en vogue, sadly.

He flogs fags.

Quite.

Wrong. The de-regulation of the banking system, that led directly to the credit crunch, goes back to the 80s and the enthusiastic political adoption of Chicago School economics (notably Milton Friedman - the economic guru of Thatcher and Reagan). This is what led directly to the destruction of the building societies as mutuals, and ultimately to the property bubbles that have been behind successive collapses. Spain is merely an extreme example - a property boom, created by a de-regulated banking system gone bananas. Remember that the credit crunch was also caused by a fatal combination of a property boom and absolutely no regulation of the banking system. The failure of unfettered capitalism embodied.

3 more to come.

This has 0-4 written all over it.