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Comment by underbluewaters | Hacker News Reader

If this is accurate, it could be very educational. I was discussing these "loans" with my Dad who owns a business with a lot of employees and was worried that he was taking on debt. He explained to my relief that a great deal of the loan would be forgiven.

Not being a business owner and having to know the details of the program, I had assumed that these were merely favorable interest rates. Seems like the politicians could have branded this program better. It sounded on the surface like they were just loading up small businesses with more debt.

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They are definitely favorable conditions, you get the loan at 1% interest and are eligible for forgiveness of up to 100% of the loan if you use it on certain types of expenses. Also, payments are deferred until after the initial period is up (June 30th). Overall a very positive program.

By making the funds loans, they also were able to quickly disburse them by using the existing legions of SBA lenders.

Though getting a loan through a big bank was neigh impossible. My fiancée's company banks with Wells Fargo and they didn't even get the application (after applying to get an application) until the first round of funds were gone. Thankfully they then applied with several smaller banks and was able to get one from with the new funding.

I think that unfortunately this heavily depended on your bank. Wells Fargo really dropped the ball, but Bank of America was one of the first banks to accept applications and therefore disburse money. We used a regional bank whom we had an existing relationship with and it went pretty smoothly, better than if we had tried with WF.

>> Wells Fargo really dropped the ball

This implies that they screwed up and they might deserve forgiveness. They had no intention of lending PPP funds except for large preferred accounts they wanted to help.

Not defending Wells Fargo at all, but they were also limited due to restrictions placed on them for some of their criminal activity and therefore had a limited pool to lend with for PPP.

Legitimate. Thanks for bringing that up. Wasn't aware.

Framing it as a loan seems like a good way to get funds out as quickly as possible while making it easier to get back anything that's misused.

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