Howe says their winter market work was limited due to Profit & Sustainability concerns.
Howe said this morning ahead of their Carabao Cup semifinal second-leg against Arsenal: "I think I've said many times it's a difficult thing to give a definitive and clear answers, and that's not me being difficult as to what the future looks like, but I think certainly the last year we know we've been managing a situation where we had to make decisions, as I've said many times before, that we wouldn't have necessarily made from a football perspective.
"But hopefully by being prudent and making good decisions now, in the future we won't be making those decisions, we've been making purely football-based decisions.
"When we get to that point, I can't give you a definitive date, that'd be wrong of me to do so, but I think everything that we're doing is trying to leave us to that point."
On the winter market campaign, Howe added: "I don't think frustrated is the right word. We had been planning and looking at numbers and opportunities for weeks and weeks and weeks. Frustrated yesterday? No. That (losing Kelly and Almiron) was a long time in making, it ended how we expected it to at the start. So different emotions for me. I think overall an element of frustration because have not taken the squad forward in a positive way."