“After nearly two hours turning over the rubble of his collapsed investment empire, Neil Woodford begins crying. He gets up and briefly walks off camera to compose himself, leaving an empty chair at his West Country home as the star of the video call. “Britain’s most famous fund manager, now its most famous failed fund manager, finally cracks under questioning about the allegedly macho culture at Woodford Investment Management. Could that have contributed to its destruction? He looks hurt and wells up as he remembers the day he told staff the business was being wound down in October 2019. The tears follow. “I found it very difficult,” Woodford recalls. “So when people say that sort of stuff about the organisation, about the culture, about the lies that have been told about the business and the people in it, that really, really hurts, because it wasn’t like that at all. It was an amazing place, with amazing people, who fought to the end.” “Woodford alternates between sadness and anger as he dissects his downfall in public for the first time. He is ready to say “sorry” to the ordinary investors who lost out on his disastrous bets, up to a point. “I’m very sorry for what I did wrong,” he says. “What I was responsible for was two years of underperformance – I was the fund manager, the investment strategy was mine, I owned it, and it delivered a period of underperformance.” But he is furious at the company’s administrator Link Fund Solutions for closing Woodford Investment Management and insists, after everything, he would have been vindicated had it stayed open. “I can’t be sorry for the things I didn’t do. I didn’t make the decision to suspend the fund, I didn’t make the decision to liquidate the fund. As history will now show, those decisions were incredibly damaging to investors, and they were not mine. They were Link’s decisions.” - Neil Woodford to launch comeback firm as he says: ‘I’m sorry for what I did’, Lucy Burton, The Daily Telegraph, 13th February 2021.

“Follow the money.” - Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), All The President’s Men, 1976.

“On Wall Street, a corner is not just an intersection of two streets. It is also a way to extract huge profits from speculators who had the temerity to sell a stock short.. In a corner, a buyer or group of buyers purchases a lot of stock. As the price goes up, short-sellers appear. They borrow stock - perhaps from the very same group - and sell it, hoping to make a profit when the price declines. Then comes the squeeze. The group, which now owns more shares than exist, demands the return of the borrowed stock. The only way the short-sellers can comply with that request is to purchase shares, and the only one who has shares to sell is the corner group. The group can set its own price and make a fortune. One reason you don't see many corners these days is that they are illegal in most countries. But another is that almost everybody involved tends to lose in the end, with the exception of lucky investors who happened to own the stock before the fun started and can sell into the big run-up in prices. Those who execute corners usually make lots of money from the short-sellers. But they end up owning a company for which they paid too much. The stock is delisted from the stock exchange, since, without enough public shareholders, there is no ready market for the stock. If the group that executed the corner used borrowed money, it may be in big trouble. In the 1920s, the most famous corner in the United States was in stock in Piggly Wiggly, a grocery store chain. The corner was successful, but the man who executed it eventually went broke. But there have been successful corners. Cornelius Vanderbilt once pulled one off, with members of the New York City Council as the victims. They had tried to profit by shorting a railroad company that Vanderbilt controlled, and then revoking the company's principal asset: a license to operate a street railway. Vanderbilt bought shares and kept the price from falling. Owning more shares than there were outstanding, he offered to let the council members cover their short positions with only small losses if they reinstated the license. They did. The big loser in that corner was a legendary speculator, Daniel Drew, who had proposed the idea to the council members. He was forced to purchase shares at very high prices. It is Drew who is credited with the saying, "He who sells what isn't his'n, must buy it back or go to pris'n." - ‘Porsche reinvents the short squeeze’, The New York Times, 30th October 2008.

“A tentative thread on the Biden speech Adam Curtis once leaned heavily on the book 'Everything was forever, until it was no more' by Alexei Yurchak - a slightly odd book about the way that language in the Soviet Union slowly degraded. Instead of confronting reality, the job of propagandists, indeed of all official discourse, was to stitch together a series of recognisable banalities. Ideas that once were essential parts of the concrete social project of the Soviet Union - building a worker's state - were now invoked in whatever context needed. Thus, you could praise the 'trenchant labour of the workers' when discussing the publication of a new edition of technical guidelines for building tractors. The incredible brittleness of this cut-and-paste discourse meant that no-one in the Soviet Union was able to process, let alone alter, the decay of the Union and its increasingly unstable economic system. So when the end came, it came as if in a dream. It suddenly made just as much sense for the Soviet Union not to exist as it made for it to have existed for decades. Today, Joe Biden - who has not without justice been compared to Brezhnev - stands reading a speech that is in essence the same as those made by Soviet functionaries. No sentence bears any resemblance to the previous one, as it does in an argument, but only makes sense as a series of moderately recognisable cliches. The point of the speech is not to refer to the world, but to refer to the system of symbols that historically legitimated the American political order. These symbols - the American dream, opportunity, prosperity, liberty, justice, community, unity, hope - have little reality today. But that doesn't matter. They are mere symbols, signifiers without signified. They refer to nothing but themselves. This is discourse as a hall of mirrors. 2 Likewise, Joe Biden is not a politician, he is a mirror: a mirror which reflects the platitudes America tells itself in order to sleep at night. But, as Jean Beaudrillard warned us, in order to see what we want to see in the mirror, we have to hide our second-self behind it. To see 'unity' we have to hide division. To see 'prosperity' we have to hide poverty. Hiding these things is not just a function of Joe Biden's rhetoric, but of the social project which he *does* reflect: the overwhelming need to put the populist project - which however imperfectly does reflect real division and poverty - in its box. How long, we should ask, can America hide what it needs to hide in order to see unity ? How long until those second souls, currently trapped behind the mirror, have their revenge ?” - Twitter thread on the Joe Biden Presidential inauguration speech by Jacob Reynolds, @jacobreynolds.