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

“Jon Quigley says he probably should have known something big was coming -- even if his risk models didn’t. Just a day after the Great Lakes Advisors manager watched CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ about America’s unprecedented efforts to deploy a vaccine when it comes, Pfizer Inc. revealed significant progress on its pandemic cure. That revelation spurred the biggest moves ever in Quigley’s $3.9 billion portfolio. While stock benchmarks cheered the news, Wall Street’s most popular styles of quant trading got hit by a historic storm. ‘Events happened that statistically never could happen,’ said the chief investment officer of disciplined equities.. Quigley spelled out the odds to clients in a note. As he computed it, the crash in the momentum factor was so rare that writing out the chances of occurrence on any given day required a 16-digit number -- followed by 63 zeroes.” - Bloomberg (Justina Lee), 13th November 2020.

“Be ye never so high, the law is above you.” - Tom Bingham, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, citing Thomas Fuller in The Rule of Law (2011).

“By long tradition, Parliament has had ultimate control over the Government’s purse strings. It must permit major spending specifically. Without this power it is just a mascot or a toy. That power has been abolished. Back in March, unnoticed by almost everyone, Parliament vastly increased the Government’s freedom to spend what it liked. The old limit, for emergency spending, was increased from a mere £11billion to almost £270billion a year. I cannot say where or how this will end. It is my own growing belief that Johnson and Hancock do not understand what they are doing. Their decision to strangle our struggling economy once again in an alarmist shutdown is one of panic piled on panic and is visibly destroying the NHS they claim to be saving, as well as laying waste to those jobs and businesses they have not yet ruined or obliterated. I see them as two schoolboys on the footplate of an old-fashioned steam locomotive, clattering into deepening twilight, too scared to call for help, too vain to admit their error. They started it moving by accident, foolishly pulling and pushing at levers whose functions they did not know. Now they cannot find the brakes. The safety valves are blocked. The whistle screams, the pace gathers. Alas, the rest of us are trapped in the lurching, bucketing train behind them, unable to reach or influence them, let alone stop them.” - Peter Hitchens, ‘The dictators have taken over – and we didn’t even notice’, The Mail on Sunday, 1st November 2020.