Verbal

You sound like one of those soothsayers in CNBC. There is no guarantee of anyone 'cashing in nicely'. It's wishful thinking - especially with a government hellbent on double-dipping. The National Audit Office - a rather more reliable judge than you or me - puts the paper loss to the taxpayer, in December 2010, at £90bn. Most of these losses are bound up in toxic assets, much of it in disaggregated and now busted mortgages in the American West and Midwest. The ghost towns and dereliction (have your SEEN Detroit recently?) are as good an indication as you'll ever get just how long a crawl out of the hole it really will be. Recovering taxpayers' 'investments' is going to be a long, painful, fraught process. There is no light at the end of the tunnel yet.

Who'd have thought there could be so many persnickety posters in one place. Well done everyone. Keep the philistines at bay.

You're being VERY economical with the truth. £137bn went on actual bailouts, but the British taxpayer's total liability for the bailout is £512bn - the remainder (and obviously the far larger amount) having been committed in the form of guarantees to prop up the creaking banking system. Interest payments alone on funds actually committed is currently costing the taxpayer about £5bn a year. All of which is why I assumed you were joking when you started this thread. Bankers are the state-handout spongers nonpareil.

Behind the sneering, leering references to 'trolley dollies' is a misogynistic, condescending, narrow-minded peevishness - characteristics found only too frequently here within a small, self-selecting group of oafs presumably in denial of their own inadequacy. I'd avoid joining this pathetic little gang if I were you.

Did you really mean to write that? Hilarious. Well at least we're agreed on something.

Even I never thought you could be this clueless. What have women done to you exactly?

Stop it!

I admire your gift for understatement. Breathtaking.

I'll have to take your side on this one Johnny Bog. A few years ago, I met Peggy Oginowski, the widow of the captain of American Airlines Flight 11. She was herself a purser in the same company. She helped us piece together the order of events before the plane struck the North Tower. I also talked to the families of Flight 11 attendants Betty Ong and Madeleine Sweeney, both of whom were left to struggle alone to deal with what they only knew at the time to be a hijacking. They had been extensively trained in responding to the violent takeover of a plane, and acted, bravely, accordingly. Almost everything we know of what happened on that flight came from calls to the ground from Ong and Sweeney. While channelling as much information as possible - which quickly revealed the identity of the attackers - they had to deal with distressed passengers, thrown into a panic by the sudden dives and turns made by the cretinous Atta and his fellow 'jihadists', now at the controls of the 767. At least one of the attendants made repeated attempts to get into the cockpit, having to find her a way past a stabbed, probably dead, passenger (Daniel Lewin), the stabbed, dying flight purser, and through a cloud of Mace. A pretty extraordinary act of bravery. So, yes - dismissively calling people 'trolly dollies' is a mark of smug stupidity. I suppose you just have to make allowances...

So you will be voting Labour next election?

You surprise me.

Are you scared trousers? Are you?

I think the random chaos is MUCH more fun. If only we could combine it with a tube strike...

I'll vote no then.

Are you thinking of a Confederacy of Dunces?

Now Ed has won over the Lib Dems as well as Labour. More LibDem voters support him than Clegg. At this rate, it's going to be a very short march back to power. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/feedarticle/9453664

Why 'got sat'? Did your mummy plonk you down next to the nasty socialist as punishment? No wonder you were in a sulk.

Have we done the English language yet?

...

He's the one with the fountain, right? Or is that dune?

Question mark?

Descartes?

Can you be a pedant and poorly informed? Surely you have to be right for the pedantry to be pedantry. Otherwise it's delldays.

Because in 'they are a couple', the 'are' agrees with 'they' (ie plural).

Is is right. Couple is a collective noun, and therefore singular.