Credit where it's due‏

"The prospect of Chelsea or Spurs, or a host of millionaire players and former players, being paid in full while others have to accept a fraction of what they are owed is not a healthy one for the game."

A bloody great big understatement that is.
It seems odd that the people who ran the club into the ground have a far better chance of getting their money back than the charities and tiny businesses may end up with barely pennies in the pound.

I'd say HMRC should get back its preferred creditor status as it's the public purse, and footballers and clubs should loose their status with some link to their income so that lower leagues players and clubs can benefit but not the millionaires who don't need the money.
How is a bit more difficult

David Bond's Blog: The true extent of Pompey horror show‏

The real nasty side of Portsmouth's debt is that
"local businesses and services who make up the list of trade creditors owed a total of £5m.

These are football's real losers. Companies and individuals who now face being paid only 23p in the pound of what they are owed because footballers and football creditors get paid in full first from the proceeds of any sale of the club.

They include:

The St John's Ambulance (for match day medical services) - £2,701
King Edward VI School (for training ground hire) - £41,714
Landscape Printing Systems (for printing equipment) - £949.33
Portsmouth City Council (taxes) - £28,690"

Disgraceful how those who most need the money are denied it so that super-rich football clubs and organisations get to jump the queue.

Larry Elliot on the economic decade

Larry Elliot is always good value.
His summary of the decade in economics is a good one, but one that probably would have looked very different if written two years ago. Until that point we had only the threat of the debt bubble bursting.
His summary, that "governments may have to face up to a stark choice. They can carry on borrowing more, thereby accepting that public sector deficits will spiral. Or they can respond to the pressure from the financial markets and start borrowing less. The latter seems the likeliest, but it would all but guarantee a double-dip recession during 2010."
is a real lesson in real and applied economic policy. The private sector loads up with debt, the government has to bail it out. Then the financial markets gets funny about the government having all this debt, so they have to cut. the richer and powerful prosper, the poor and powerless suffer. Same old. But a very interesting lesson in 'realpolitik'

Co-operative football?

From this very interesting article about supporters running football clubs and the amount of debt and money flowing around.
And the bloke is a Southend fan, most important.

I saw this little gem in with the comments:
"SR819 wrote:

Football needs to be nationalised in my opinion. We've seen the effect of free market fundamentalism on many aspects of life, including football. The free market concentrates wealth, and the effect of this is that football fans are seen as consumers, clubs as corporations and the end goal just appears to be profit maximization. This is not to say that the business side to football is unimportant, and clubs need to able to have a sustainable model, but I believe football clubs should be run as social businesses, with an understanding that the football club has a responsibility to social cohesion and community in their local area. Since this is unlikely to happen in the short tern, government intervention is required in my opinion.

Eventually, I hope to see football clubs (as well as all workplaces in all industries) run in the form of co-operatives, and in light of recent events in the last year and a half, I believe this paradigm shift isn't too far away."

Britain's in 'saving money' shock

News and analysis out today shows that "Last month British households paid back more debt than they took out, for the first time in at least 16 years."
Good.
Althought this means there is a danger of serious tightening in the economy, to say nothing of the prospect of things like deflation, this is good at a very macro-strategic level.
Our economy has been based on the idea that we could borrow for ever and ignore savings, which lead to the massive property bubble which burst so spectacularly recently.
From the point of view of the economy, and someone with a job, this is good news because it means people are moving towards a more sensible and sustainable economy. For those poor so n sos out of work, it means things may not get any easier any time soon. Which is where the state comes in, as usual, to clean up the private sector's mess.