Most PPP loans have been forgiven, despite signs of possible fraud

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/12/1128207464/ppp-loans-loan-forgiveness-small-business

by gmays • 4 years ago

190 225 4 years ago

axus• 4 years ago

I've been really surprised that this hasn't been a political issue. These loans were a good deal larger than the student loans that've been forgiven, and a dream come true to anyone who's ever made money from fraud.

pirate787• 4 years ago

PPP fraud is a feature, not a bug.

Clent• 4 years ago

Political memory is so fleeting. The bill was stripped of any oversight by the allies of business.

houstonn2• 4 years ago

People are so used to watching billions of dollars go missing or wasted that it has become background noise.

prottog11• 4 years ago

I'm entirely unhappy about the whole PPP situation, but I think the reason why it's taken up less space in public debates is because ostensibly it was to compensate businesses for being forced to close. Student loans had no equivalent government mandate to have people take them on.

I would prefer the counterfactual where nobody was forced to close (any longer than maybe the first couple of weeks) and therefore nobody got helicopter money; but since that isn't what happened, the next best thing would be aggressive prosecution of fraud. One can dream.

PopAlongKid2• 4 years ago

PPP loans went to "job creators", always a favorite politically-protected class.

it was to compensate businesses for being forced to close

More specifically, it was to "protect paychecks", to keep workers on the payroll who otherwise would have been let go. Sometimes, but not always, one of those workers was the business owner. In theory it was a pass-through benefit aimed at workers, but the employers not only had the loans forgiven, but also got a tax deduction for spending the government's money, and even sweeter in some cases, got increased tax basis in their business for the loan money they never repaid.

efficax• 4 years ago

giving away money to business owners is always OK by the lights of people in power, since business owners help make the people in power rich. giving money to loser normies who can't pay their student loans? what's in it for them?

dmix2• 4 years ago

This is a cute theory but in reality it's far more likely to be usual government malaise, laziness, and disregard for long term consequences than some organized secret push by millionaires with pull in the government.

readams• 4 years ago

PPP loans were always supposed to be forgiven from the beginning. Nobody would have taken the loans otherwise. It was not really a loan it was a payroll subsidy to keep the economy from collapsing.

Also, this was actually authorized by Congress and not declared by fiat in an enormous executive overreach.

leshow2• 4 years ago

If anything it's a good case of why "trickle down" economic policies don't work very well. Many businesses who got the loans still fired employees, the cost of each job saved was high.

NovemberWhiskey4• 4 years ago

It's not a political issue because both parties were in favor of it.

MisterBastahrd• 4 years ago

It's sort of interesting. Just the mental gamesmanship aspect of the entire thing.

There are people who will swear up and down that welfare is the root of all evil. That bootstrap pulling is necessary, that there's opportunity for everyone regardless of their situation, and that all you need is hard work and dedication to succeed in the US. They will wring their hands about the federal deficit and will howl about the size of the national debt. Just look at the student loan forgiveness issue.

But if you dangle a $6K per head loan in front of them, with no consequences whatsoever, every one of these same people will take and say "what did you expect me to do? I've got a business to run." Because for the vast majority of them, complaining about welfare was never about their taxes, or even considering the plight of the individuals who need the money.

It's about the thing that they complain the "woke" masses of doing.

It's virtue signaling. It was never about the money. It was about self-justification.

prottog11• 4 years ago

Is your point that people are hypocrites by complaining about welfare and turning around and taking welfare for themselves when it's offered with no strings attached? I suppose the hypocrisy is true, but it also doesn't come with a lot of weight. It'd be like pointing out that the people who post "no human being is illegal" signs on their lawns don't actually take in refugees or vagrants in their homes.

I don't know about welfare being the root of all evil, but there are valid discussions to be had on that topic from people arguing in good faith, and I think it's perfectly justified for someone to feel that their taxes are too high or that welfare benefits provide too much.

Aunche• 4 years ago

I don't like PPP forgiveness, but at least it was voted on by Congress. Also, student loan forgiveness is literally fueling the problem that it's trying to solve. It will increase the willingness to pay of people of college, so colleges will increase tuition. Unlike businesses that reinvest their money to expand, colleges reinvest their money to chase prestige, so they have no incentive to keep prices constant.

bryanlarsen• 4 years ago

AFAICT, there's nothing stopping the government from charging recipients with fraud even after the loan is forgiven.

PopAlongKid2• 4 years ago

IRS advises that improperly forgiven Paycheck Protection Program loans are taxable

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-advises-that-improperly-for...

peteradio• 4 years ago

Taxable? At 110%?

bombcar2• 4 years ago

This is what people forget. The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine - the government will slowly gather data and eventually charge some of the most egregious examples of fraud.

Sadly, this usually is the people who tried a fraud for the first time instead of those who are experts at repeated frauds. Nobody follows the letter of the law like someone violating the spirit.

kotlin2• 4 years ago

That just seems so unlikely. There were so many PPP loans (over 10 million forgiven). The government can't possibly go through even a small percentage of the fraudulent loans with enough rigor to build a compelling case of fraud. We'll be lucky if they reach 1000 cases of fraud.

dsfyu404ed• 4 years ago

AFAICT, there's nothing stopping the government from charging recipients with fraud even after the loan is forgiven.

Nothing except that peaky thing called political reality that tends to get in the way of every ham-fisted enforcement action that the pro-jackboot subset of any given democracy is calling for at any particular minute.

Remember back when they tried hiring more IRS agents? The left made memes about government turning the screws on the poors once again. The right made memes about shooting feds. It was very clear that few on either side of the isle supports that kind of stuff right now.

Political reality precludes making even a suggestion of doing that prior to November 9th or thereabouts. The PPP fraud is a dead bloated deer in the middle of the political road at 3pm on a Friday. And 2/2 employees of the animal control department are hoping the weekend guy can deal with it if the coyotes don't get to it first.

And frankly, I kind agree. It's water under the bridge at this point and while the fraud was predicted it did mostly get dumped into the economy as intended and there's no way to know we didn't avert a worse crisis by doing that, fraud and all.

BWStearns2• 4 years ago

When I was in college in DC during the financial crisis, friends and I were at a bar and some guy comes in and pays the whole bar's tabs. Shouted "TARP MONEY!" and leaves. Pretty sure that guy was doing some fraud, but he was nice enough to share so I guess that's something.

It's hard to make a program like that quick enough to be effective without allowing fraud so I get the free for all style distribution. But especially with programs like TARP/PPP where the recipients are generally _already wealthy_ and the payments are relatively large, I'd like to see some after-the-fact scrutiny where people who commit fraud are punished, otherwise it reinforces the impression that money buys impunity.

CrazyStat• 4 years ago

But especially with programs like TARP/PPP where the recipients are generally _already wealthy_ and the payments are relatively large, I'd like to see some after-the-fact scrutiny where people who commit fraud are punished, otherwise it reinforces the impression that money buys impunity.

This is happening, it's just slow. For example [1].

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-man-sentenced-over...

alistairSH• 4 years ago

t's hard to make a program like that quick enough to be effective without allowing fraud...

Wasn't that the reasoning behind structuring PPP as loans? Get the money out as a loan, then forgive/not-forgive later after the borrower submits paperwork proving the funds were used appropriately.

It appears that second phase isn't happening - the government is just forgiving everything.

panarky4• 4 years ago

I don't know if that was ever stated as the rationale, but many people inferred that it was.

It's a defensive inference, to defend our belief that authorities wouldn't attempt to solve a crisis by just transferring a trillion dollars from lower rungs on the economic latter directly to higher rungs on the ladder.

We want to believe that the distribution of wealth is caused by individual behavior, that every person deserves their station in life however opulent or impoverished. We want to ignore the systems of power and privilege that exploit the low to further enrich the high.

But PPP strips away even the veneer of fairness and lays bare the brutal mechanics of wealth distribution based on power instead of contribution or merit.

Perhaps the reason PPP was structured as loans instead of grants was to maintain that fig leaf of fairness, to allow us to continue to defend the indefensible.

Scoundreller8• 4 years ago

I think the “loan” structure was to allow the corps to defer the revenue.

It let them flush themselves with cash while claim a loss on paper and reduce/reverse their taxes that year.

gumby3• 4 years ago

An existing program through the SBA was used as it was the fastest way to get cash out the door. That program happened to be a loan program, so they were structured that way with an almost automatic forgiveness.

Think of it as an API adaptor.

jandrese• 4 years ago

The problem of course is that the review process is an enormous problem and there just aren't that many people in charge of reviewing them. I think a lot of people who are tuned into grifting the government saw it as a huge opportunity.

ItsMonkk• 4 years ago

It appears that we are heading into a recession as we speak.

What are law makers doing right now to prepare for the possible effects of this recession? What are we doing to predict which parts of the financial system will collapse? What are we doing to prepare if CO-VID mutates into a deadly strain? We've known for 30 years that the climate will change, have we done anything to prepare for the consequences of that?

Why must we always need to react and pass TARP or PPP within a week time-frame or the entire economy crumbles?

jjtheblunt3• 4 years ago

We've known for 30 years that the climate will change

to your point, archaeologists have been scuba diving to sunken coastal Greek and Roman era cities all around Mediterranean coasts for decades too, sunken from sea level rising may meters over the last couple thousand years.

Just another interesting datapoint straight from National Geographic magazines as a kid, before politicians really grabbed hold of global warming.

polski-g2• 4 years ago

We entered a recession at the start of this quarter.

NovemberWhiskey4• 4 years ago

TARP is nothing like PPP though; the vast majority of TARP bailout money was basically in the form of asset purchases (equity stakes in banks, finance firms and insurance companies), loan guarantees and finally outright loans to large companies in the auto-industry.

Although there was an expectation that some of the asset purchases might turn out to be valueless, or that loans not be repaid; there was no concept of loan-forgiveness baked into the bailout. Indeed, basically of the TARP money was repaid in full.

PPP's definition of success, on the other hand, was that jobs would be preserved, resulting in the forgiveness of the loans.

Scoundreller8• 4 years ago

Indeed, basically of the TARP money was repaid in full.

Sorta. If you invested money at the bottom of the market in late 08/early 2009 and only broke even several years later, you must have set half the money on fire (edit: or embezzled it).

pwinnski• 4 years ago

Referring to "TARP/PPP" is misleading, IMO.

TARP disbursed $440 billion in exchange for assets, and received back $443 billion to return those assets[0]. It made a small profit for taxpayers.

PPP is... not that.

0. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/tarp-bailout-program-3305895

BWStearns2• 4 years ago

I didn't mean to over-imply the similarities. I was mostly pointing out that large scale interventions rightfully sacrifice oversight for speed/impact, but that it'd be nice to see more after the fact accountability.

jedberg• 4 years ago

My guess is that person was against TARP and was trying to make a political statement, since you couldn't really spend TARP money like that.

HWR_143• 4 years ago

t especially with programs like TARP/PPP where the recipients are generally _already wealthy_ and the payments are relatively large, I'd like to see some after-the-fact scrutiny

Or, here me out, we stop giving rich people money regardless. I can see a program that protects businesses in 2020 since they were shut down, but think we could have had a better program than the PPP. I don't understand why we didn't just let companies in 2008 go bankrupt. Can someone explain it to me?

ls6122• 4 years ago

2008 was essentially a liquidity crisis not a solvency crisis. Think of it as a bank run on things that looked like banks but didn’t have deposit insurance (hence all the talk afterwards about ‘shadow banks’)

Once you understand what was happening the solution of first solving the liquidity crisis (by having the government front the liquidity; note that all of the banks paid back the TARP money), and then instituting strict capitalization regulations on banks (ie Dodd-Frank and Basel II which hurt their profits by reducing risk) to avoid the same thing happening again and remove some of the moral hazard is a perfectly reasonable policy response.

prottog11• 4 years ago

There will be many technocratic explanations, but in the end it'll just be like land management policy which prevented small-scale natural wildfires from burning year after year and eventually ended up in a conflagration.

fasteddie310032• 4 years ago

Was it a mistake to drop interest rates to 0 and give out free money to business owners during a pandemic? I think monetary and fiscal policy overreacted to the pandemic, but we'll never hear from anyone in power that it was a mistake. I don't think our government leaders have learned anything.

testfoobar3• 4 years ago

It was a massive over reaction and a massive mistake. Inflation now is a direct consequence of indiscriminate spending. Politicians do not seem to understand basic economics. E.g. California's inflation relief checks going out right now.

yojo2• 4 years ago

This is correct in hindsight. At the time, a lot of smart people were forecasting economic armageddon. Businesses screwed up too; big, well financed companies like Airbnb did massive layoffs. My superhost acquaintance went on to have her best year ever.

None of this excuses the lack of oversight, but the initial overreaction may have been rational.

Inflation related stimulus is of course farcical.

paxys• 4 years ago

California isn’t printing money for these checks like the federal government did. It is all coming from the budget surplus, and is not going to have a meaningful effect on inflation.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 4 years ago

I don't think our government leaders have learned anything.

The next group of politicians will have "learned" from this - in the sense that people will have voted them in based on whatever random views they had that matched with how the will of the people has changed.

I doubt existing politicians ever learn anything. Especially when our politicians pride themselves on "not flipping" on views. How are you supposed to learn anything if you never change your mind?

We don't elect people who learn. We elect people who we think are always right (charlatans).

I skeptical the people we elect in next will have any better ideas, because I don't think "we" learned anything from this either.

stvswn• 4 years ago

Fraud aside, which is a problem, the "forgiveness" of the loans was the plan all along so it's not as if businesses were expected to pay them back.

The program was really a bailout so businesses could maintain their payrolls when everything was shutdown. Instead of writing the checks directly, the government decided to frame it as a loan that would be forgiven if businesses stayed in business and spent it on their payrolls. This was a good strategy for the government, because it would have been pretty tough to enforce otherwise.

So the loan forgiveness was by _design_ and the point of the program was to keep businesses alive when the governments themselves were (for perhaps good reason) making it impossible for them to operate. It's not really "forgiveness" in the sense of, say, the college loan forgiveness program.

brightball• 4 years ago

Exactly.

You kept people employed and on their employers insurance, benefits, etc. You let businesses try to remain as operational as possible during the shut down.

The alternative was going to be mass layoffs, unemployment and medicaid/aca applications.

The people who keep harping on PPP seem to forget everything else that was done in the same time period.

nrmitchi2• 4 years ago

There’s a difference between people complaining about PPP as a concept (which I don’t think many are?) and complaining about PPP abuse, funds being given to companies that were not impacted by shut downs, straight up fraud, and people taking PPP money and buying lambos.

tastyfreeze2• 4 years ago

There was another alternative of not forcing businesses to shut down in the first place.

caseysoftware• 4 years ago

So the loan forgiveness was by _design_ and the point of the program was to keep businesses alive when the governments themselves were (for perhaps good reason) making it impossible for them to operate. It's not really "forgiveness" in the sense of, say, the college loan forgiveness program.

I think this is a key point.

The PPP "loans" effectively became a payout to mitigate the chance & success of businesses suing the government en mass for the shutdown orders.

When you sue an entity civilly, you have to show damages. The PPP "loans" countered those damages (and often more) which means the threshold for a successful lawsuit just got WAY higher.

testfoobar3• 4 years ago

Indiscriminate programs like PPP were a direct contributor to the inflation we see today.

1MachineElf• 4 years ago

As was the indiscriminate shutdowns of US businesses during the pandemic - the PPP raison d'être.

some_random• 4 years ago

It's been interesting seeing people freak out about the stimulus checks and student debt forgiveness and just... forget about PPP. I don't get it.

ryandrake• 4 years ago

It's also interesting that politicians want to means-check every penny that goes to the general public, including the stimulus and debt forgiveness but also welfare, food stamps, medicaid, and so on. It's imperative that nobody is taking advantage of the system! But when it comes to PPP and other handouts to corporations, suddenly they have no way to means-check or figure out in some other way whether the recipient actually needs it.

ProfessorLayton• 4 years ago

Interestingly this is missing an important piece of context that led to PPP in the first place: A novel worldwide pandemic that was/is killing a lot of people and forced businesses to close — causing an immediate and brutal financial emergency for small businesses in particular.

Small businesses account for roughly 60% of all jobs in the U.S.

Yes, adding processes to reduce fraud would've been helpful in reducing waste, but how do you suppose that should've happened? What kind of infrastructure do we have to means test that many businesses? Could it have happened within a typical pay period or two? How were workers/businesses supposed to eat and pay bills until then?

houstonn2• 4 years ago

It is interesting how stimulus checks and PPP aren't treated the same way. However, debt forgiveness is not the same. The government did not compel students into debt. They did compel businesses to close and people to lose their income.

anon291• 4 years ago

To be clear... I support stimulus checks and PPP, but not student loan forgiveness.

I do believe that those whose educations wer disrupted by the pandemic should be compensated by having their loans forgiven.

This has to do with government mandates causing monetary harm.

hirvi742• 4 years ago

It's also interesting how many politicians who received PPP loans are against student debt forgiveness too.

thomasjudge• 4 years ago

$2.3 Trillion Trump tax cuts

phpisthebest6• 4 years ago

Then you are in a political bubble being spoon-feed reactionary commentary, because there are all kinds of outrage over PPP fraud and abuse

xfsdfdsfd• 4 years ago

It was bipartisan. Both parties voted for it. The student debt forgiveness is not bipartisan and even controversial within the Democratic Party.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 4 years ago

People get pissed off when their neighbor gets something and they don't.

They aren't even usually aware when the rich guy in the other neighborhood got a handout.

johncessna• 4 years ago

Getting forgiveness on loans that you chose to take for a school you couldn't afford otherwise is different than getting money from the government after local governments forcibly shut your business down.

josefresco• 4 years ago

Anecdotally (of course) of the handful of business owners that I know (personally) who received PPP funds, 75% of them didn't need the loan and all of them had their loans forgiven. Some of these businesses had their best years ever (revenue).

giarc• 4 years ago

There was probably a lot of "I'm going to get mine" attitude, but I also suspect many took the loans in anticipation of needing them. Remember, very smart people said the economy was going to get destroyed so it would be prudent for businesses to prepare. If you didn't need the loan, but were told to prepare for the worst, why wouldn't you get the loan?

meroes• 4 years ago

Same. Someone I know claimed he/the owners received $5 million for a single restaurant location over the pandemic. The owners didn't "need it" unless you count not being less wealthy by pumping in their own money a need.

But hey, that's the system and they chose to play it. Maybe a requirement to post on the physical business how much pandemic money they've got would be an easy middle ground.

I'm glad he told me though so I can I understand what really keeps businesses going.

boole1854• 4 years ago

Since we're sharing anecdotes...

Anecdotally of the handful of business owners that I know personally who received PPP funds (3 businesses total), all needed the loan, used it to maintain payroll, and all of them had their loans forgiven.

vkou7• 4 years ago

Since we're sharing anecdotes, anecdotally, the only business owner I know personally who received PPP funds (My wife's employer) needed the loan, kept everyone on the payroll, paying them to do nothing, until PPP funds ran out, and once that happened, laid off half the staff.

He then continued running the business at a loss, paying out of his own pocket for the next year and only now has returned to something resembling profitability.

Why was the business operating at a loss? Because of the social changes brought about by COVID, it took over a year after the mandates were lifted for his customers to return to the status quo.

thwayunion• 4 years ago

You're both right. I know of 10 cases in my social circle.

Two were small tech companies (not startups) that pivoted to WFH services in 2020, had their best years ever, and then returned to their normal work portfolio in 2022. Good years.

Five were restaurants I frequent. Two of those went out of business, two used PPP to pay salaries then laid folks off, and one had a fantastic year because they already had eds+meds+tech clientelle, were in a fairly good pandemic-weathering of the city (lots of SFHs and huge parks), and executed extremely well on the "delivery but we'll keep the social third place vibe going with various virtual events" model.

One is a auto dealership (well, a manager at an auto dealership). Basically used the PPP to pay salespeople salaries for a few months and by the time the first summer came around it was back to business as usual.

The rest were various other small businesses for whom PPP was basically purely supplemental income.

The only one I'm really sour about is a tradesman who did a bunch of under the table cash work (unreported so a 30% boost already) + got PPP + got enhanced unemployment. Almost two straight years of tax fraud. Bought a $300K boat and bunch of other toys this year.

All were forgiven.

ChainOfFools• 4 years ago

As someone whose own consultancy provides services to a couple dozen of these small businesses, primarily ones which happened to fall under the rubric of "essential services", I noted that nearly all of them received outsize PPP awards (on the order of half a million and up for 30-ish person companies, which had no shortage of income due to being among the aforementioned essential businesses). These were almost immediately forgiven.

In most cases the businesses were able to apply twice and get two separate awards. I'm not sure what the mechanism was for this as our business itself never applied for these loans.

In the aftermath of all of this there has been a distinct pattern emerging in which these small business owners have developed a kind of amnesia about the money they've received from these loans and have assigned the upward balance sheet inflection to their own "hard work" commitment and demonstrated acumen in negotiating the covid crisis.

I suppose this isn't exactly untrue, but there is no internalized recognition that this success was a one-time phenomenon due to a one-time windfall from the government.

Another anecdote somewhat unrelated is that the number of family-run (i.e. father and son/s) trades businesses in my local suburb all seem to have decided they need brand new work trucks at the same time. These vehicles are uniformly the upper end luxury trim levels of the line, lifted and stanced to absurdly aggressive proportions, and show no signs of being put to any of the actual work for which they would be utterly impractical anyway. The number of rear window stickers with Sparta helmets or some sort of depiction of an automatic weapon suggests the PPP loans may end up having inadvertently helped equip and arm a future informal militia.

ted_bunny2• 4 years ago

The PPP was an upward wealth distribution. It might look like a technocratic accident, but things always, always, always shake out this way.

On a similar note, the ~$2000 of assistance most Americans got went straight to landlords. This crisis was fully exploited by people who knew exactly what they were doing.

meetingthrower2• 4 years ago

I'm in PE and have looked at probably 500 deals this year. All received PPP, and in virtually all cases it has dropped straight to the bottom line as a dividend to the owner. (I don't do any restaurant / hospitality businesses, and focus on businesses that would have been open in pandemic.)

Biggest wealth transfer to owners of small(ish) businesses ever!!!

icedchai• 4 years ago

My uncle's business got a half million dollar PPP loan with millions in profits and over 15 million in the bank. It was distributed as employee bonuses. You wonder why there's inflation.

treis2• 4 years ago

This article is really misleading. The study they cite says:

Overall, we find 1.41 million questionable loans representing $64.2 billion in capital with our primarƒy measures. These measures inevitably contain some false positives, which would lead to overstatements, and some flagged loans may have been legitimately eligible for smaller loans. However, the measures also miss many forms of suspicious lending, and sensitivity analysis indicates this total is likely substantially understated. Slightly lowering the threshold on the high implied compensation and considering excess loans in industry-county pairs beyond the number of establishments reported by the U.S. Census results in a total suspicious lending estimate of $117.3 billion.

So 64.2 or 117.3 out of 800 billion is suspicious at some level. That doesn't mean the entire value of those loans is fraud. Just that they were goosed to increase payout. So anywhere from a few percent to 15 percent. Which for how large and how fast is actually pretty darn good.

The real scandal here is that it was an ill-conceived program. The political powers at the time acted like we'd lock down for a few weeks and then everything would go back to normal. But that was pretty obviously not going to happen. Ultimately PPP had a marginal effect on what businesses survived. Most of the ones that did would have anyways. PPP was just money directly into those owners' pocket.

Even worse, lots of businesses went gang busters during Covid. So most of this PPP money went to the winners of the Covid economy instead of the losers. It was just one gigantic blunder.

spookthesunset3• 4 years ago

The political powers at the time acted like we'd lock down for a few weeks and then everything would go back to normal.

I mean we should have. It was quite clear very early on that the computer models predicting 4% IFRs were off by almost an order of magnitude.

Retric17• 4 years ago

We hit over 1 million dead after flattening the curve, effective treatments, and a huge swath of the most vulnerable population getting vaccinated before infection.

Models showing 4% IFRs without drastic measures like lockdowns seem fairly accurate to me. Simply letting COVID run rampant may have done less economic damage because it’s vastly less deadly to working age populations, but we would have barbarically sacrificed a significant chunk of the population for little gain.

treis2• 4 years ago

Even if we legally went back to normal that doesn't mean consumer demand would have gone back to normal. It was pretty clear that it wouldn't have gone back to normal until the vaccine was rolled out.

random3142• 4 years ago

Yes, the IFR has been consistently estimated at 0.4 to 0.7 since February 2020. 0.5% of 8B world population works out to 160M excess deaths. This calculation assumes availability of medical facilities at 100% with no dead doctors or nurses. I don't think our public facilities can handle so many excess dead bodies unless we let some float down the river.

https://www.google.com/search?q=india+covid+19+floating+bodi...

March 2020 - IFR estimate in China 0.6%, CFR in China estimated as 1.2%

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7118348/

"Adjusting for delay from confirmation to death, we estimated case and infection fatality ratios (CFR, IFR) for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on the Diamond Princess ship as 2.6% (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.89–6.7) and 1.3% (95% CI: 0.38–3.6), respectively. Comparing deaths on board with expected deaths based on naive CFR estimates from China, we estimated CFR and IFR in China to be 1.2% (95% CI: 0.3–2.7) and 0.6% (95% CI: 0.2–1.3), respectively."

March 2020 - Symptomatic case fatality risk 1.4% https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7

"Using public and published information, we estimate that the overall symptomatic case fatality risk (the probability of dying after developing symptoms) of COVID-19 in Wuhan was 1.4% (0.9–2.1%), which is substantially lower than both the corresponding crude or naïve confirmed case fatality risk"

AtlasBarfed• 4 years ago

So, just to emphasize, the Government gave out EIGHT HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS to business owners, who are going to be well-to-do or better, as "loans", and then just forgave them quietly.

Honestly, those people who were being fraudulent actually were doing the right thing, because it siphoned money off from this egregious example rich people getting money outright and redirected it to the "demand" side of the population. And let's face it, the larger corporations can simply shuttle around accounting to make whatever look legit it needs.

ck2• 4 years ago

Crowdsource finding individual fraudsters with a bounty per successful prosecution.

Is there a statute-of-limitation on prosecution?

GartzenDeHaes• 4 years ago

Politicians are not stupid and they are not incompetent. These laws were very effective at their intended purpose of helping political cronies steal the money. Whether it's emergency flu fighting F35's or programs for the homeless that do not help the homeless, these results are intentional.

fwipsy• 4 years ago

Anyone else seeing massive memory usage (multiple gigabytes) in Firefox under Ubuntu on opening this page?

ranprieur• 4 years ago

Stop using the word "forgiven". Borrowing money is not morally wrong. A better word is "canceled".

ontehuontuheou• 4 years ago

The etymology is instructive. for-give https://www.etymonline.com/word/forgive

The reason it's associated with morality is because the idea of wronging someone implies that the one who is wronged is owed something. By offering forgiveness, what was owed is remitted. This also applies in the idea of sin, an offense against that which is divine.

And it applies in the context of a loan, where one party is owed something by another.

So, in the concept of forgiveness, it is the owing that is important. Any implication of morality is incidental.

But, also, there are indeed moral systems that consider borrowing money to be wrong. Although that's uncommon, and perhaps you were arguing that those moral systems are incorrect.

shagymoe• 4 years ago

This is straight up theft.

gumby3• 4 years ago

This shuldn't be a surprise: they were always grants de facto. They were simply implemented by wedging them into an existing program which was a loan program.

If anything is surprising it's that less than 100% weren't forgiven. As for fraud, well, the feds know how to prosecute it whether it was for a loan or a grant.

victor106• 4 years ago

PPP is one of the biggest frauds in modern America.

How could the US government allow this to happen is beyond me.

https://youtu.be/LhhoQbzupug

jesuspiece• 4 years ago

But student loan forgiveness is the problem, sure

stylefinance• 4 years ago

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Sincerely.

Most PPP loans have been forgiven, despite signs of possible fraud

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