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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

The last few years was a perfect storm of stupidity:

- The Fed juicing the market (and not stopping when it should have, dismissing inflation concerns as transitory, etc.)

- Covid stimulus going to people who didn't need it

- People spending that stimulus money to invest (often for the first time) on zero-fee platforms like Robin Hood

- Meme stock investors intentionally manipulating stock prices to cause them to diverge from the underlying value of the company

Despite all of that, people who bought and held a total market or S&P 500 index fund in 2020 have still made gains.

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> - Covid stimulus going to people who didn't need it

From the stimulus the worst of the offenses by far happend in the PPP for small business. It was absoutely shameful.

While there was of course waste in the direct treasury payments to citizens, they get way overrepresented compared to what happened in the PPP. It's the same human nature of: If a big company gets 100M of our taxes for no reason, people grumble a bit, but if their next door neighboor gets an extra $100 and they don't, you never hear the end of it.

The PPP was rife with waste, but by design you'll hear way more media and people complain about the co-worker they know of or cousin that spent $1000 on trading cards.

Edit: And skipping my rant that it was by design that the PPP had no transparency and the adminstration fired the inspectors general that would oversee the program for waste to avoid transparency.

Edit: And to be clear it's fine to have untargeted stimulus for people to cover day to day expenses, and also fine to have loans to businesses to keep things afloat. But to intentionally do so with blocking transparency, and removing oversite officials is just creating a cesspool for waste.

If it kept businesses alive it was probably worth it. Small businesses take a long time to establish themselves but can be snuffed out pretty quickly. Many of my friends with such businesses barely made it and the PPP loans were crucial in getting them through the pandemic.

The purpose of the “stimulus” funds wasn’t to give what was needed to the people who needed it. The purpose was to smooth out the economic whiplash. We knew there would be an enormous temporary dip in demand, but that structurally (long term) we’d still need all our businesses and couldn’t really afford for them to go bankrupt.

The money was supposed to be given to those who could spend it, to help keep all our small/medium/large businesses as healthy as possible.

> The purpose of the “stimulus” funds wasn’t to give what was needed to the people who needed it.

Agreed, and providing direct payments to people who are working to put together food or pay their rent makes perfect sense to me. The potential disasters we would have seen if we hadn't done that would've been horrible.

And providing loans to small businesses so they can keep functioning also makes sense. But firing the inspectors who are supposed to oversee the small business loans (as they always have done), blocking pushes for basic transparency of even what businesses receive the loans, and then "forgiving" 97% of all loans as a gift from the govt is beyond wildly irresponsible.

I basically operate within small to medium size business as sales in California. Every business owner I know took/got so much PPP money they flat out feel guilty but at the same time all they did was take what was being offered. It's probably the most internally rage inducing thing I've ever heard of, but Im so used to faking agreement to keep the sales relationship alive I basically can block it out. Money is sales feels like fake money anyway so I can cope. But I think if any hard working people really found out what happened they'd almost go French revolution on government.

Not taking PPP money that your business is eligible for is akin to paying more taxes than you're required. Maybe it's honorable in some strange way, but it's certainly not rational.

In my humble opinion - this is a great insight on both paying your fair share and not taking PPP/social security/unemployment even if you technically can but don't actually need it. It should be lauded more even though it probably will never be.

I don't know why we would have debates on whether we should "laud" things or not. How about regulating things, rather than having debates about who or what should be praised? Companies aren't dogs or children. I personally get very little from either the praise or condemnation of anonymous strangers.

Not really directed at you, I'm just sick of the idea that if we all get together and declare things good or bad, that's some sort of accomplishment. People who do well do well through ignoring the irrelevant and immaterial comments of busybodies and bikeshedders.

Moral exists and you can aim for a virtuous life in an Aristotelian way and are free to think people who strive for that should be admired. I am at this point in my life of an opinion opposite to yours. What people do is not neutral and people who abuse system or knowingly profit from harmful systems have a negative impact on our society as a whole and it is legitimate to see their actions as bad.

I'm struggling with this personally as I decide whether or not to work for unethical companies in exchange for life-changing compensation.

Overall I think my suffering-footprint is tiny compared to most so maybe I'm okay with being a bit more unethical in some areas of my life. But I'm unsure.

Agree - ideally it would be better if everyone just did their own thing and was valued by society for their contribution.

The comment is much more as a counterpoint to the existing dogma of valuing an individual's contribution to society primarily based on ability to amass capital (i.e. splashy magazine covers based on net worth - which often translates to percentage ownership of a company valued on the price paid by the last marginal buyer).

there's nothing fair, gov policies are created to stimulate economy, and that literally means people should go get it and spend it. stashing it in overseas safe haven is less ideal than say spend it all

At the time, it also wouldn't have been wise because none of us had any clue what was going to happen long term. If you'd taken that money, paid your short term shortages with it, and held on to your reserves you could have been spending instead, you'd be in a better position later if things kept going badly.

> But I think if any hard working people really found out what happened they'd almost go French revolution on government.

I can't speak for everyone, but I have simply decided to opt-out wherever possible; I'm not going to fight against a system that has moated itself out of obsolescence. If startup culture has taught me anything it's been to learn when to expend your energy matters more than you may think as it compounds over time. If you're constantly deluding yourself there is reform in a system that is designed to be this way, you'll be in incapable of creating viable alternatives.

I had qualms about how poor the US education system--I went to both private and public schools--when I was student, I couldn't fathom just how much we spent and how poor the results were in almost all facets until I realized that this was exactly what it was intended to be: a bloated bureaucratic system designed to siphon funds from the pubic coffers into private hands and enrich an administrative class who seem content with throwing out what they feel impedes them meeting their easily manipulated metrics.

With that said, I still think the airline bailout was the real takeaway of how this whole debacle was managed [0] in the US. It's the typical Socialism for the rich, ruthless Capitalism for the poor playing out all over again as we saw in 2008. Failing up happened, and the stock market and housing market rallied in the midst of mass unemployment and re-opening problems for small businesses etc... this is all make-believe, and it has been for most of my Life, too. It would be almost laughable, in a jaded George Carlin way, if it didn't have such dire consequences: homelessness, and over-dose death due to substance abuse is a pandemic itself.

Personally speaking, after having done sales for my fintech startup, I learned to do the same: but I'm realizing just how internally jaded it has made me about most things in Life. It has a spill-over effect that didn't really dawn me until much later in Life long after I left tech for a while, and returned to culinary whose work force is mainly the 'working poor' who constantly get screwed over. I've helped several of my friends get over the worst situation, and I'm glad they are mostly doing better, but it isn't by much after inflation and perpetual rent hikes.

0: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54381496

The purpose of the stimulus check was for Donald Trump to put his name on a check to a bunch of voters.

The extent to which it happened to help out people in need or "the economy" was secondary.

But those stimulus checks was a tiny part of the overall stimulus, which included PPP "loans" (that are widely forgiven)

Is there any notion of a fast in economics

A startup I worked with that raised 20+ million in late 2019 filed for ppp and got 600k+. They didn’t need it but all they had to do was say Covid had impacted them, when truth be told it impacted all of us. It was a waste of tax payer dollars. I just hope the businesses that truly needed it were able to get it.

the local immigrant mom and pop shops that needed it I'm sure had a hell of a time navigating the paperwork, not to mention trusting the government and banking system to take care of forgiving the loan when all the conditions were met.

My wife's small store (two owners, no employees) was unable to figure out the PPP paperwork, threw up their hands and said 'screw it' and just got on with figuring out how to reopen. I think the smaller the business, and the more they depended on that business to pay the bills, the less likely they had the time and resources to navigate the paperwork.

The funny (or sad) thing is, "small" firms that are hedge funds also managed to apply and because they often have tax accountants on retainer, they had an easy time doing the paperwork!

What paperwork? All PPP requested was w-2 data and rent/payroll information. If you run a legal business, you have these things on hand constantly.

You might be surprised how much money is made and exchanged under the table which makes negotiating these things precarious for some businesses. The negative economic impacts when these businesses die are still felt regardless of if they cheat on their taxes.

I think we're discovering now that all that was needed is Photoshop

My wife and business partner had no payroll, because they do things themselves. Some people were telling her she could still get PPP, but it was not possible to get an informed bank human on the line to ask about it, and then all the money was gone and she moved on.

If this was the very first round of ppp, I believe that banks got up to speed after a few weeks, and more money was found, so the situation improved considerably.

A counter example, my neighbor owns a small drycleaning business and was able to navigate the paperwork. He has a long-time relationship with a particular local bank and I think someone there helped him navigate.

>not to mention trusting the government and banking system to take care of forgiving the loan when all the conditions were met

This concern could have been allayed by keeping the funds in a bank account until certain of forgiveness. Absent said forgiveness one repays the loan using the retained funds.

This assumes that the funds were not needed in the first place.

the funds were limited so only the wealthiest banking clients made the cut. PPP was a perk for people with premium business bank accounts.

There were reports of that for the first round, especially from mega banks like Wells Fargo.

But not all lenders were banks. My company got its two PPP loans through ReadyCapital. My company had zero previous relationship with them.

$4.2 trillion was the total stimulus spent. I find it hard to imagine the scale of this spending, with nothing to show for it. No new infrastructure was built, and we still seem to be staring at the beginning of a recession.

That's an interesting and sobering thought. It basically bought two years of breathing room but also delivered the Fed a very tricky puzzle that they need to solve now. And solving that puzzle without causing a recession later this year is going to be very difficult.

> ... nothing to show for it.

> still seem to be staring at the beginning...

Isn't that the whole point of preventative measures?

"not nothing": could have used less money.

Relatedly, getting a recession now does not at all mean these measures were not successful or that this recession is at all similar to the one that was prevented.

The OP didn't mention PPP.

The PPP was much different than the other forms of stimulus. It either went to employees, or it had to be paid back. The interest on the loan was low though.

I doubt much of PPP funds were being used in the meme trading game.

I think if you dig a bit you'll find that PPP was absolutely rife with fraud. The verification was "is this going to employees? Promise?"

For the initial loan to get it issued quickly, that’s correct.

To have the loan forgiven, you had to submit documents at tax time to verify it or it became a low interest loan that had to be paid back.

PPP was one of the best ideas that came out of locking down the entire country because otherwise a tooooon of people would have been laid off immediately. Instead, even people who couldn’t do any work at all due to lack of child care were able to be paid, maintain insurance and benefits. They had to act so quickly.

I didn't say there was no fraud in the PPP program.

The OP comment didn't mention the PPP specifically as stimulus.

The context of the article, is individuals investing money in meme stocks.

The PPP went to business owners (with the assumption they would pay employees rather than laying them off) and likely wasn't being used for meme stocks.

I was reading through the WSB Reddit sub at the time. There was a lot of chatter there about people using their personal stimulus payments for investing in meme stocks.

I also spent a lot of time on Reddit subs checking chatter on PPP and EIDL. Of the two, my guess is there was a lot more widespread fraud (more people involved, but with smaller disbursements) with the EIDL. The EIDL was giving out 1K per employee (up to 10K) for anyone who claimed they were business owners. That didn't have to be paid back.

How is a check for a tax credit wasteful?

No really explain that logic as when we give tax credits to business we do not then again use the same screwed up logic

the biggest example, the Trump org tax credit check from early 2000s. in fact now that the IRs know it was base don fraud there still asking for it back.

No, the worst by orders of magnitude was the fed QE. It lead to system-breaking levels of wealth transfer.

This and the arm chair government spending police in this thread is completely wrong. The PPP helped a ton of small businesses who needed it. I, along with many small business owners in our industry got PPP, used it correctly on employee payroll, rent and utilities. It took me all of 30 min to apply for each of the PPP rounds. It took me about the same amount of time to apply for forgiveness.

Of course there were problems with the wrong people getting their hands on the money. If you actually put up a ton of filters to make sure the wrong people didn't get the money, it would have delayed the actual people needing money from getting it. The right thing to do is to hand out the money fast and go after the abusers later.

These comments are the reason why the small guys always gets the short end of the stick. The big companies have their army of people to solve problems. The small guys are the ones who need it fast without the bureaucracy. Comments like "too much waste" and "shameful" do not hurt the big companies one bit. They just put up another road block for the small guys.

No one had said stimulus wasn't needed. It's perfectly valid to believe that PPP was bad policy and also that a targeted stimulus was necessary.

The wrong people getting the money is exactly what people are criticizing. I think you just disagree on the ways of preventing it.

Chicago used 60% (300million) of relief funds on police personnel costs, it's not just the business aspect that was fucked: https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/02/18/chicago-used-60-of-d...

Is that PPP?

It had an impact on keeping paychecks going to people, cops can buy meme stocks.

So can arms dealers. We’re worsening inflation by flooding military contractors with money too.

Hmm, I thought the thread was about how well or badly PPP was organized. If other stimulus measures, or defense spending was badly managed, that doesn't really mean that PPP was badly managed.

> The right thing to do is to hand out the money fast and go after the abusers later.

In my opinion, this is not a winning strategy. It takes magnitudes more efforts to go after criminals and recover misappropriated money than to prevent the crime in the first place.

P.S.; I'm not an American, so I don't think I have much say in judging how you guys spend your taxes, anyway.

This isn't something being advocated as a general strategy. This is an emergency relief strategy, and it makes sense in that context.

In a crisis - and covid was one that came about as fast as war to Ukraine - the thing that matters most is speed.

Yep I remember how everyone thought COVID would lead to a depression.

Honestly who cares if a bunch of gambling addicts and dumb kids lost money on GME or Luna? The real economy is safe for now.

> Yep I remember how everyone thought COVID would lead to a depression.

I don't think we are in the clear already. Just take a look at the markets right now.

It also takes magnitudes more efforts to means-test than to simply distribute resources equally, yet here we are.

I went through some of the PPP records and found some seemingly fraudulent things, like a youth baseball club receiving an absurd amount of money.

Was it poor record keeping or was it fraud? Companies sprang up just in time to receive loans, including a bunch in California named things like "88 Cloud Computing". All of the names in this case had 88 in them, which is often code for neo-nazi crap (88->HH->Heil Hitler).

It helped those who needed it, sure, but the deliberate sabotage of record keeping and oversight seems intentional.

Sequential 8s are also lucky in Chinese.

The person who filed the paperwork for these companies had an Asian surname, so this is far more likely.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/lebnitz-tran-san-j...

Those four companies - 88 Cloud Computing LLC, 88 Enterprise Services LLC, 88 Investment Empire LLC and 88 Venture Capital LLC - each received between $350,000 and $1 million in loans within the span of a week in June 2020. The four companies purportedly provide cloud computing and investment services and two of them listed 24 employees each; however the address of all four businesses is a home in an affluent South Bay suburb.

It sure feels like the "business owner" fleeced the USA out of a few million dollars.

That particular one was arrested and is facing hundreds of years of prison sentences (multiple counts of fraud, etc).

The PPP was precisely Bernanke's "Dropping money from helicopters" scenario.

I think the fear of a Depression was real, and the government was willing to pull the level on the most outrageous tool they had, which was drop money from the skies into the pockets of people who could spend it.

Of course I think that was wrong, but I know exactly where this came from, and it was a playbook that was broadcasted by Bernanke I believe decades ago to fight a Depression. At least we can all agree that it worked, although a little too well, which is why asset prices have skyrocketed and inflation has gone horribly wrong.

The action of the FED was clearly faster, heavier and in the end better than the ECB. As a result, the FED was able to increase the interest rates faster. Sure it was not perfect but "good enough".

> The action of the FED was clearly faster, heavier.. than the ECB

Well of course, the situation was vastly different. First, in most EU countries there were very few people losing their jobs due to various existing or expanded temporary/partial/etc. unemployment schemes which meant that people kept their jobs, but were paid by the local government instead of the business. Second, the ECB didn't have the required authority to do what needed to be done, and it required negotiations between the eurozone members to agree on how to proceed in regards to loans. And third, actions were taken locally at each government level.

Yup, instead of providing a reasonable recurring "stimulus" income directly (along with suspending rent/loans) during the emergency, PPP loans funneled massive amounts of money into "business owners" pockets.

The loans were meant to be used for payroll but the process was so opaque and full of loopholes that business owners could simply play a shell game and keep the funds, or some people even created businesses to receive it.

What irritates me is that this is another instance the heavily flawed "trickle down" concept. Companies time and time again act against the best interest of individuals. PPP only further enriched a small subset of business owners at the expense of individual taxpayers.

A clear wink-and-a-handshake "deal" to funnel huge amounts of government money into corporations with minimal oversight.

If the money had gone directly to people instead, it could have been spent as normal, and that would have done more to help local SMALL businesses stay afloat. Plus the business owners who had to close for lockdowns would have been receiving regular benefits too and rent/loans should have been suspended.

The problem was that the lack of controls meant it was so easy for the fraudsters to set up situations where they would get the money and not face the repercussions.

We saw the same thing with unemployment--the system got overwhelmed so they quit checking and the result was a lot of identity thieves collected unemployment for workers who weren't actually unemployed. (Of course the real problem is the unemployment system has been deliberately kept dysfunctional because that reduces the amount they have to pay out.)

> - Covid stimulus going to people who didn't need it

Could you please elaborate? I think the way the US did it's COVID stimulus was outstanding and very close to the ideal way to actually address people's potential needs.

> - People spending that stimulus money to invest (often for the first time) on zero-fee platforms like Robin Hood

What's exactly the problem? Aren't people free to spend their own money any way they feel like it? Or are we now held accountable by a righteous capitalism police to determine if an expense we make is kosher?

> - Meme stock investors intentionally manipulating stock prices to cause them to diverge from the underlying value of the company

What's exactly the problem? I mean, who are you to tell what's the "underlying value" of something, specially in a free market economy?

It seems to me that worst case scenario the people spending their money on stocks are only gambling their own money, and best case scenario they profit from their own investment.

> It seems to me that worst case scenario the people spending their money on stocks are only gambling their own money, and best case scenario they profit from their own investment.

A lot of people got swept up in the hype and got left holding the bag after the initial set of meme investors made their money and got out.

I generally favour the way covid stimulus went but I suppose the argument would be that if it's going to people who are using it to buy GME maybe they didn't actually need it.

Whether it _should_ only have gone to those who needed it, or just to everyone, is another question.

> Could you please elaborate? I think the way the US did it's COVID stimulus was outstanding and very close to the ideal way to actually address people's potential needs.

I have a number of friends in the contracting/remodeling/construction industry. Demand for their services skyrocketed during COVID while they were all simultaneously working with their accountants to maximize their take from the COVID PPP program.

Huge quantities of COVID money were pumped into companies that absolutely did not need it, and that's not even counting the massive volume of fraudulent claims. The COVID Paycheck Protection Program was supposed to shore up companies that would otherwise have to fire employees, but AFAICT nothing really stopped highly profitable companies from also collecting the money.

> Huge quantities of COVID money were pumped into companies that absolutely did not need it (...)

Since when is revenue and profit dictated by anyone's sense of fairness? That's an awfully moralistic and judgemental take on everyone else's needs and desires.

Sadly this blend of judgemental view of everyone's money already hit small things like buying groceries. Damn the have-nots for generating inflation by actually stocking on the decent food that the well-to-do used to buy.

Do you see any problem in anyone spending their own money in any way they'd like?

I was referring to PPP loans from the government that were forgiven: https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/covid-19-relief-o...

These were supposed to keep at-risk companies from failing when the economy crashed, but then the economy didn't crash and instead it was just a huge government handout of free money to most companies.

Just reminder that if you know any abusers, report it to the DoJ.

These people who bought homes and shit with ppp are going to go to prison. I hope at least.

I don't think there's enough investigative power to find all the people who were abusing the system. The level of fraud that I personally witnessed of people filing hundreds of PPP loans for non-existent businesses was in the high 7-figure range, and that was just 2 guys I happened to hear of. There were likely hundreds of scammers doing the same thing in every major city, each stealing millions of dollars each.

It should be possible to identify these people very easily with a SQL query. To qualify, a business had to have been running for some time (years) and have payroll. So run a query for "loans issued to entities with banking history < 1y and w-2 withholding payments == 0".

Good luck figuring out where the money actually went, though.

And now recession seems to be here and they will probably get bailed out again.

Small business owners are a very powerful political force. If you are handing out checks to regular people (their employees) You basically have to give them something or they will wreck you.

Not just companies; megachurches, antivax orgs, even a Jan 6 rioter got a PPP loan. The most egregious examples are starting to be brought to justice: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/man-convicted-27-million-ppp-...

I think you're putting too much weight on "did the economy crash" here. As in, "wow, the economy didn't crash, we shouldn't have done anything" aka "wow, Y2K didn't ruin everything, we shouldn't have updated all that code" or "we didn't get hacked, why did we bother applying security updates" or similar.

"We want to prevent the economy from crashing hard and long" is how I'd phrase motivations. Certain sectors did crash immediately, and yet the overall blast radius wasn't very large and a lot of stuff bounced back immediately.

That seems like a great success.

Loans being forgiven to generously even for companies that did NOT see a sustained dip in demand, on the other hand, is a more targeted specific problem, and a lesson to learn. But if you learn too broad a lesson like "stimulus is dumb" then you just drive yourself back off a difference cliff next time something exceptional happens.

A better lesson to learn is that shutting down major sectors of the economy was dumb. It was a total overreaction, and proved to be completely ineffective in controlling the pandemic. If politicians hasn't done that then there wouldn't have been a risk of an economic crash in the first place.

> If politicians hasn't done that then there wouldn't have been a risk of an economic crash in the first place.

This is naive and ignores the real sequence of events.

Things like conferences were getting canceled before the first official government actions in the US. Groceries were being hoarded. People were paying attention to events. The government sticking its head in the sand or just repeating "everything is fine, stay calm" messages wouldn't have prevented any impact.

Uncertainty is an economic killer. And if you remember early on, that uncertainty also led to a lot less controversy over the canceled events and restrictions than arose later. (Though in retrospect, even many "paranoid" estimates back then were far less than a million US deaths...)

Some level of stimulus was almost certain to be necessary regardless of official Covid actions in March 2020 unless you wanted to just let those companies and workers drown as people chose to change their behavior.

(The "restrictions should've been loosened earlier" argument is a much more reasonable one, but IMO still ignores how much of this was already local by winter of 2020, and also that at that point the initial economic damage was done.)

(That's before getting into the recklessness of assuming future severe novel diseases won't be even more deadly on limited early data...)

If the PPP was intended to help struggling businesses, but your business wasn't actually struggling due to the pandemic, then you didn't need it. It has nothing to do with fairness.

> Do you see any problem in anyone spending their own money in any way they'd like?

"How dare you tell the bank robber to return the money he stole. Who are you to tell him how to spend his own money? That's awfully moralistic and judgmental of you."

The original PPP was intended to give money to all businesses with employees, to incent them to not lay off workers (it was a loan, repayable if the company reduced their workforce). The second version of the application form added a clause (after media bruhaha) about "potentially being affected by the pandemic", so would exclude some small subset of businesses that could absolutely guarantee that nothing about their future revenue and input costs would change aversely. Any concept of actually having been negatively affected in the past, prior to application came much later.

I agree with you they targeted small businesses pretty heavily with stimulus, and probably a lot of fraud occurred. While some of that money made it in the form of bonuses to employees, I bet a lot of it was soaked up by the frothy stock market.

People were opening businesses to take advantage of the PPP. I hope this gets addressed.

Yes but observing the end effect it was apparent a lot of that money went into the stock market, and thus didn’t really go where it was needed. The damage was done already.

> Huge quantities of COVID money were pumped into companies that absolutely did not need it, and that's not even counting the massive volume of fraudulent claims. The COVID Paycheck Protection Program was supposed to shore up companies that would otherwise have to fire employees, but AFAICT nothing really stopped highly profitable companies from also collecting the money.

And this was by design. The administration at the the time explicilty pushed for there to be no oversight at all on this. The opposition party at the time said it's just setting things up for fraud and corruption, but it was desired to have no oversight. Not even after the funds had been released (if you wanted to make an argument that upfront oversight would have slowed down the distribution).

The administration both fired the inspectors general that would oversee the program, and passed laws to prevent transparency into the program. It was fairly controversial at the time, but now mostly lost in the haze of 2020 lockdowns.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/15/inspector...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/16/taxpayers-...

I have multiple friends who received second draw PPP loans for their businesses in summer 2021 under the current administration. They received a significant percentage of their 2019 revenue in a full distribution to spend on payroll and some other expenses despite the fact that their monthly revenue at the time of distribution had rebounded. They were able to bank current revenues because current costs were covered by the loan, which will ultimately be forgiven. It didn't make any sense. I don't blame them for taking advantage of it though.

IMHO they should have done a compromise where the terms of eligibility were closer to 2nd draw in that you needed to have an actual emergency, huge sick leave, late bills, etc. Or at least high likely hood.

Still give it out right away. Just put a checkbox on the form. And then follow up with the details on forgiveness later.

If a company jumps the gun, they think things look black, but in a month it turns around and they are fine allow them to return it or keep it at a low (but not crazy low) interest rate.

For foreignness prove the loss/necessity.

So can go after egregious abusers. Because it wasn't abuse if you took it and didn't need it. So long as used for payroll, rent, etc. Because why wouldn't you take free money. We did.

It's fine. We needed a sensitive intervention, not a specific one. And given the time constraints, those two were definitely in opposition. The administration made the right choice.

This. The perfect program 9 months later would not have been useful.

This is directly akin to using the defence of "i didnt realise the burning coal was hot". Common sense would have got you 99.9% of the way to not hurting yourself but you reached into the fire and grabbed it anyway. Given these are fiscal monetary "experts" they should have and could have done better. That includes delegating decisions and actions to those better able.

I’ll also chip in to say this was by design

I have 0 or negative AGI while sometimes having gross income/earnings/gains in the millions I got auto-sent several stimulus checks of the max size, because Congress wrote it based on having an “AGI of $75000 and lower” or similar number. AGI is after most tax deductions

Back to the by design part, the primary goal was to keep velocity in the economy high, and that means getting it to people with a high spend

Fairness is not a factor at all

Our economy works from velocity not whether one has money. Hoarding is worse than spending, not saying that poorer people would hoard just how its not a factor. It was designed to make maximum spending

Someone prewrote it for congress they knew what they were doing while congress was just scared

Examples I witnessed are friends who never lost their job got like an extra $8k (couple working with two kids). So they bought stuff with it.

I have multiple friends in tech who switched to remote and literally used the extra stimulus cash to trade with Robinhood and crypto.

I doubt this is representative. But people making $100k who ended up saving money from no longer needing to commute did not need thousands of dollars in stimulus. Of course, it was neat getting the money, but it resulted in a lot of extra cash.

Comically, I also have friends who just paid down debt and didn’t buy anything.

But my anecdotes are lucky in that I didn’t know anyone who lost their job or got seriously ill.

I feel it’s worth pointing out that saving people from financial ruin was only part of the intent of the PPP legislation. The main point of a “stimulus” is to stimulate the economy. If your friend received money and then spent it on something, the legislation essentially worked as intended.

The PPP was the Paycheck Protection Plan.

It was not sold as a stimulus, it was to allow businesss to pay furloughed employees (in a bizarre ill-thought-out privately-run unemployment insurance scheme) to continue to pay ongoing expenses.

What didn't make sense, of course, is what those people were supposed to be buying, since the reason they were furloughed was because.... people weren't buying things, because of lockdowns and such. Hence, inflation when aggregate $ exceeded stuff worth buying.

> The PPP was the Paycheck Protection Plan.

> It was not sold as a stimulus, it was to allow businesss to pay furloughed employees (in a bizarre ill-thought-out privately-run unemployment insurance scheme) to continue to pay ongoing expenses.

Can you clarify what's your rationale for believing that a program designed to "allow businesss to pay furloughed employees (...) to continue to pay ongoing expenses" does not correspond to an economic stimulus program?

It was not to pay furloughed employees, it was to avoid having to furlough or lay off more employees than they did anyway. Furloughed employees did not get paid, but retaining a certain percentage of pre-pandemic headcount was a requirement for the loan to eventually be forgiven.

Source: I was furloughed April 2020 while my employer at the time received over $2m in PPP. Furloughed employees were explicitly told to collect UI.

If they spent the extra money on secondary-market financial investment (like stocks or crypto), propping up asset prices, then that seems like it goes against the stimulus that the program wanted, which was to keep steady sales for otherwise reliable businesses.

It certainly stimulated GameStop stock.

I think the criticism is that the stimulus worked too well and we’re suffering inflation and whatnot now.

Inflation is hitting most countries aggressively now. The US may actually be on the conservative end of inflation which may have been buffered using government subsidies/influence, but the net takeaway is the rapid expansion in the world can't be explained by simply looking at the US's free-money-keep-buying scheme.

Not Japan, for instance: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2022/05/an-inflation-puzzle.h...

The graph shows until this Feb. JPY has been plunged about 13% recently, and even without it import energy/food/everything price is increasing for obvious reason. Let's see whether salary catch up (I doubt).

Most countries adopted the same loose fiscal and monetary responses, with the same predictable results.

> The main point of a “stimulus” is to stimulate the economy.

Yet, at the same time, they were forcing parts of the economy to shut down. Nothing like hitting the gas and the brake at the same time.

> Examples I witnessed are friends who never lost their job got like an extra $8k (couple working with two kids). So they bought stuff with it.

And what's wrong with that? Aren't we talking about an economic stimulus program? What do you think is the whole point of an economic stimulus program, other than stimulating the economy?

What’s wrong with it is a few things:

1) there could have been more money for people who actually needed it and were negatively impacted by losing their job or getting sick or whatnot

2) buying lots of “luxury” items drove up inflation. This is bad for a whole slew of reasons we are seeing now.

If we wanted to stimulate the economy, we could have done it in more effective ways that didn’t hose us.

The economy was tanking, how long would it have taken to filter the deserving people? How many thousands of people would have fallen through the cracks? How much money would have gone to laid off white collar people while 'essential workers' still had to go into work and earn minimum wage in the middle of a pandemic? This is politics, can you imagine the outrage if such an already polarizing figure decided to pick and choose who got the funds and who deserved more? I am very much not a fan of the Trump administration but in this situation I think they played a bad hand pretty well.

First, I’m not a professional economic policy person so I assume they will have much better ideas.

But we could have put rules in place that were enforced retroactively. Something like “you get $600 if you lost your job. Everyone who asks gets it. But when you file your taxes if you didn’t lose your job and you took the money, you have to pay it back.” Stuff like that.

I worked for a consulting company that had a pretty smart expense approval process. They approved everything and audited you severely when you went up for partner. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty close as people were really nervous and conservative even though they wouldn’t be audited until years later.

There was also a lot of stuff where unemployment paid more than working so there were perverse incentives to not work and make more money. I had a family member who normally made about$2k/month. He got $600/week in unemployment so took a long time to go back while making an extra $500 per month. Stupidly, he bought a car with the extra money (but he’s been able to keep making the payments).

Just having some cap that paid 80% of your salary in unemployment would have been super simple to implement.

Or some programs ran for over a year. So the emergency stuff could have phased out after 3 months or 6 months.

There’s lots of ways they could have designed interventions much better.

> There was also a lot of stuff where unemployment paid more than working so there were perverse incentives to not work and make more money. I had a family member who normally made about$2k/month. He got $600/week in unemployment so took a long time to go back while making an extra $500 per month. Stupidly, he bought a car with the extra money (but he’s been able to keep making the payments).

On an instinctive level I prefer hearing a story like this to the kind of story that would have been more common/worse without the very broad aid that was given, but perhaps this sort of event is quite damaging as well. I'm not sure it's possible, but it would be interesting to see attempts at quantifying the difference.

> Just having some cap that paid 80% of your salary in unemployment would have been super simple to implement.

There is nothing super simple about government unemployment insurance programs, especially in recent years. What about Uber drivers, per diem nurses, people whose employer was dependent on events in Wuhan so their pay was cut?

Even if there are easy answers to these questions, UI is administered by the states so there are going to be more than 50 versions of each answer.

> It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty close as people were really nervous and conservative

How is that close to perfect? I assure you that some people who would need and actually deserve that payout wouldn't apply for it just out of the irrational fear that it will cause them problems later.

> buying lots of “luxury” items drove up inflation

How so? buying stuff cures inflation. Are you referring to supply chain shortages making non-luxury stuff not get produced?

Buying stuff drives prices up and contributes to inflation, not cures. There’s the same amount of stuff but more cash, so prices go up.

COVID relief was not an economic stimulus program. It was intended specifically to ease economic pain and displacement, not to stimulate an economy experiencing slack demand.

If someone got a stimulus check they didn’t need, and put it all in GME, then it seems like everything has worked out great.

Someone who did want the money (enough that they were willing to sell some GME stock to get to) got the money instead.

And now the person who didn’t need the money hasn’t got any money.

Justice served?

Maybe. but like crypto scams where everyone keeps stealing from each other and paying yeild farmers to get leverage, it's really hard to see what the net net of all the money flying around is.

> Could you please elaborate?

College students who weren't planning to have any income anyway before Covid hit. And that's at least still a relatively "legitimate" payout compared to the screw-ups like sending money to prisoners [0].

But really both cases are massively massively dwarfed by anyone who could fog a mirror starting an LLC and getting $40k to $250k of PPP money. I personally know a couple people who should go to jail for this (but probably won't even have to repay the money, let alone repay with interest, let alone get in trouble).

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2022/04/05/gover...

Why do the dollar amounts always go

    Inappropriate QE >> PPP Grants >> Stimulus Check for undeserving person

but the reporting happens in proportion / order

    Stimulus Check for undeserving person  >>  PPP Grants   >>  Inappropriate QE

? It's a rhetorical question, we all know why, but we don't have to repeat these choices in this thread.

Reminds me of water conservation focusing on personal use versus industrial agriculture in the middle of literal deserts. Or the output of a Toyota Camry versus a container ship.

Same reason we're told to stop eating beef and take public transport to fight climate change, and almost nothing about reducing population or taxing and punishing fossil fuel cartels and profiteers.

Yeah. We got stimulus checks we didn't need. I think that was the right thing to do, though--they would have come out a lot later if they had to go through and try to figure out who needs them. Especially since both of us are self-employed, the IRS simply gets the quarterly estimated payments and nothing about what we are actually making until we file the tax return.

PPP was a fraudster's paradise, though. The idea was good, the implementation was not so good.

> College students who weren't planning to have any income anyway before Covid hit. And that's at least still a relatively "legitimate" payout compared to the screw-ups like sending money to prisoners [0].

Where exactly do you see a problem with that? To put it differently, do you feel it's better to arbitrarily discriminate against elements of your society with a program intended to actually help everyone everywhere?

More importantly, what leads you to believe that the goal of the COVID stimulus was to help individuals instead of society as a whole? Think about it for a second. In a moment in time where circumstances were leading to an unprecedented economic crunch, wouldn't a bottom-up consumer side stimulus help economy stay afloat?

Because college students yolo-ing on Gamestop options isn't especially productive for society.

But, as I said, my bigger issue is the massive PPP fraud. And my issue with massive fraud on the scale of hundreds of billions of dollars is that the US is already deeply in debt.

And my issue with the nation being deeply in debt is that future generations will have to pay for the profligate spending of this one, which I find immoral.

> a program intended to actually help everyone everywhere

it should have been a program to minimize the shock to the economy.

it should never have been a program to help everyone everywhere, because this type of program triggers inflation and is often followed by recession.

I bought my wife a handgun and myself an AK-47 with the last one. I certainly needed the weapons but not the check.

Should have bought a 5.56 mm, now that cheap Russian ammo is no more.

I lost two jobs directly due to COVID and got $0 “stimulus” while my sister was employed the entire time and got an absurd amount of free money.

It wasn’t a stimulus. It wasn’t COVID related either. It was income redistribution. I might respect it to some extent if people called it what it was.

> It was income redistribution.

And in the end it was redistribution from the lower to the upper class. The last two years were the biggest wealth transfer in history. And "wealth" is so much more than just money... we absolutely screwed our kids in a way that will impact them for quite some time.

This is what every major crash in the US economy is. Poor people lose assets and rich people can coast long enough to buy them up cheap. Not a surprise that we are headed towards continuously record-breaking levels on income inequality

The second stimulus was a disaster.

It has led to an unprecedented sticky-inflation that can only be brought down by inducing a recession.

It's not that there were warned by prominent economists https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/inflation-larry-summ...

"Could you please elaborate? I think the way the US did it's COVID stimulus was outstanding and very close to the ideal way to actually address people's potential needs."

Many of the people who got the stimulus checks didn't need them. Same with the advanced child tax credits (increases spending when it looks like you have more money). This was true for myself and many coworkers. There were others who needed it. It was far from perfect though.

"What's exactly the problem? Aren't people free to spend their own money any way they feel like it?"

Yes they are free to do that. It causes problems when there's a disconnect between value and price. Many of the activities were trading or gambling, which are not beneficial. That gambling affects prices and the market, thus affecting others.

Think about what happens when's there's a rush on a bank. A bunch of people acting stupidly in large numbers can create a negative environment for everyone else.

> Think about what happens when's there's a rush on a bank. A bunch of people acting stupidly in large numbers can create a negative environment for everyone else.

that's not people acting stupidly - a bank run happens when trust in the banking system drops to below a critical threshold. This trust might be eroded by some external event, and mishandling by the governing authority etc.

it is rational then, as an individual who cannot change the authority's handling, to take action to protect one's own interest.

> Yes they are free to do that. It causes problems when there's a disconnect between value and price. Many of the activities were trading or gambling, which are not beneficial.

they are beneficial from the point of view of the person doing it.

It isn't the activity that causes the problem - it's that those activity is funded by taxpayer money, not their own!

"it is rational then"

Something can be rational and unreasonable at the same time. It seems you answered your own question from your previous comment - it creates a problem for others based on them acting on their own self interest.

"they are beneficial from the point of view of the person doing it."

Just because it's beneficial for one person doesn't mean it can't be a problem for others.

"It isn't the activity that causes the problem - it's that those activity is funded by taxpayer money, not their own!"

Even if it were their own money, it would still cause problems. Although it's questionable if they would have participated in that behavior without the extra money.

I never needed/wanted covid stimulus money, but it was practically jammed down my pockets by force when I did my taxes.

> What's exactly the problem? Aren't people free to spend their own money any way they feel like it? Or are we now held accountable by a righteous capitalism police to determine if an expense we make is kosher?

Yes, they are free to spend their own money that way…evidenced by the fact that they weren’t prevented from spending their money that way. Other people are also free to call their choices stupid.

There's nothing outstanding about repeatedly handing out thousands of dollars to every taxpayer and increasing unemployment because all the gig economy workers were upset that there was no more gig economy for a few weeks. Just like every time our government bails out organisations like GM, none of that money did any lasting good for the economy and simply served to increase the entitlement rampant among US citizens. Imagine a place where people who deliver disgustingly unhealthy takeout to a population where the majority of morbidity and mortality is directly related to chronically poor lifestyle choices are called "essential." Thanks to all that "stimulus," there is no small number of people who hardly worked the entirety of 2020, if at all.

"I know you took this job because there wasn't really an interview, you don't have a real boss, you work whenever you feel like it, you don't have to do anything you don't already do every day and it's just so hard to find a job in the Great Resignation, but now you want to cry foul because there's no job security due to people not having enough money to stuff their faces full of shit for a few weeks, so here's some extra cash. 'Murika!" "Oh! It wasn't enough that we paused student loans for all of 2020 and 2021, so we're going to keep extending that, even knowing many of you will just bedmaking minimum payments until the remaining balance falls off (I know doctors making six figures who have been doing this since before the most recent pandemic)."

Full disclosure: I was unemployed for about half of 2020, didn't ever take unemployment and survived on my VA disability while actively pursuing employment. I have also currently paid 80% of my student loans after graduating in 2016. We should be teaching the next generation how to survive in this increasingly dysfunctional world, not letting them believe that some person/organisation will always be there to bail us out after every stupid decision. Apparently, you haven't noticed, but the US brand of capitalism and the stupid idea that we'll just keep throwing money at every problem is literally destroying the planet.

You can't shield kids from the effects of the economy and the world. Even given the best of luck and hard work ethic they could fall sick, into debt, and financially crippled.

I think you have the relationship inversely related. The stimulus was -because- people were not working, which was because there was a global pandemic that was also incredibly mishandled by the gov

Anecdotal but all my friends who work retail ended up making more on stimulus/unemployment than they did working. That is already strange but when you add in that people on unemployment were making far more than the "essential" retail workers and it became kind of perverse.

> "are we now held accountable by a righteous capitalism police"

I would argue that yes, if you are getting free money from the government to help sustain you during trying times it is reasonable to say it shouldn't be used for gambling. I don't think we are impinging on anyones freedom to say they can't spend their food stamps at a casino.

Platforms like Robin Hood make money off delaying the transaction slightly and microtrading in advance of it, as well as compiling a 'bigger picture'.

The "geniuses" in GME, Stonks, WSB, etc telegraph to the entire world what they're going to do via their subreddit, then give the trading house even more data showing how many people follow through on particular "talk", allowing the trading house to accurately predict what sort of activity a post will generate.

They think they're incredibly smart when really all they did was fuel the world's largest pump-and-dump scam. /r/GME was deeply depressing during some of the crashes, with people sharing poverty-food recipes not just to help people get by who had lost more than their disposable income, but to help people buy even more stock.

> Could you please elaborate? I think the way the US did it's COVID stimulus was outstanding and very close to the ideal way to actually address people's potential needs.

The way the US tax system works meant that non-residents got the cheque as well (because they have to file taxes). Non-residents are usually able to reduce their tax liability to zero, so a US citizen earning over 200k but not living in the US would get a cheque mailed to them.

- The Fed juicing the market (and not stopping when it should have, dismissing inflation concerns as transitory, etc.)

This in my mind is the key reason we as a society did not solve the pandemic quickly. If the investor class felt the same pain everyone else did, they'd be throwing their resources towards moving forward rather than re-locating to Palm Beach and complaining about the Northeast.

> This in my mind is the key reason we as a society did not solve the pandemic quickly.

Ignoring a lot of the specifics you make a good point. There was a lot of good effort thrown after bad mistakes, financially, medically and unfortunately sacrificing civil liberties.

This gamblers fallacy of 2020-2021 is starting to wear off and the hangover is setting in. 2023 is going to hurt :(

Can you elaborate? I'm failing to understand the connection between the Fed Juicing the market and investors moving to Palm Beach dnd complaining about the Northeast? Was there a mass exodus? Would that not also be moving forward though? Or am I missing something?

We did solve the pandemic quickly. The entire population was vaccinated in a matter of months.

looking at ongoing death tolls in the United States and elsewhere

Are you serious?

Eh, I got into the meme stocks, cashed out, and paid off my student loans. So, not everyone is stupid for it!

Huge win, congrats. :-)

As long as you realise and acknowledge that your student loans where paid out not at the cost of growth of the company whose stock you meme-d or some hedge fund (who remained solvent long enough to ride this meme-wave), but at the cost of other retail investors who bought into the hype a few days/weeks/months after you only to lose their investments, many congratulations to you!

If I was op I would be sleeping very well at night.

Let's not forget to add the huge NFT/Web3 craze last year to the list. That is what, signaled to me personally, stupidity.

Maybe even the Pokemon cards as well

Agreed. I had a friend lament to me recently that he hadn't got into NFTs early. To me, that just sounds like someone wishing they were born retarded.

If they had got into NFTs early, they would have an investment that's up 100x or so. Why does that sound to you like they're wishing they were born "retarded"?

Because the whole premise is completely idiotic, it's just designed to scam people into spending money on nothing.

> Because the whole premise is completely idiotic, it's just designed to scam people into spending money on nothing.

Ok, so this friend of yours wishes that they would have made 100x return on what you describe as a scam. You describe this as "wishing they were born retarded". How does that make sense to you? If you want to criticize the morality of making money of the backs of others in a scheme that resembles a Ponzi, do that. What you described was something else entirely.

Anyone who unironically invested in an NFT project solo was a mark. NFTs are a simple scam: To plan this game you loan crypto to your friends, you all "buy" the same NFT from each other multiple times so that the price appears to go up astronomically, then you wait for a sucker to buy it from you or any one of your friends. When that happens you all laugh, split the money, and start the grift again with the next NFT. Nobody risked their money, and if you don't get a bite at the "top" price everyone just returns the money back to the original friend and nobody gets hurt.

You just keep the NFT that is still "worth" whatever you last paid for it, but it's basically free to you. So what do you do? Loan it to a celebrity and announce it as if it's a sale! This generates news articles about celebrity adoption, they get your bored ape that you couldn't sell, and suddenly a new wave of suckers floods into the market.

The fact that it's so simple to do this and scam people makes NFTs a great scam vehicle. Add in the fact that crypto tends to attract true believers (aka fantastic marks) and you elevate the grift from great to all-time.

If anyone from a VC fund is reading this, yes this is actually what's happening with your Web3/crypto investments lmao.

I might nitpick you on the tone and exaggerations, but on the substance of your post I mostly agree with you. However, none of this answers the very simple question I asked GP: ""Why does that sound to you like they're wishing they were born "retarded"?"" Now I know you are not GP, so you can't answer on their behalf, but I'm just pointing out that you wrote a very long answer to a question and your answer didn't even try to relate to the question that was asked.

This 2 hour video is probably better than my the rest of my comment:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

I could buy a starter pack of pokemon cards for something like $20 USD. It's a game, I can find a friend and play it. I can play almost any normal video game for $10 to $60 USD.

To play Axies, you need to buy around $900 worth of "starter axie" NFTs.

People are buying ugly pictures of apes for prices like $11,000 USD.

NFTs produce artificial hierarchy and scarcity over functionally useless, objectively worthless, and materially non-existing assets. It is the claws of a dystopia reaching in to take away the free and open internet we've all learned to love.

Ponzi schemes and scams are so ubiquitous in the crypto space (presumably mostly NFTs) that they coined a new term "rugpull" for talking about it.

NFTs featuring unauthorized art is so common that Deviant art implemented a feature to help artists get notified when someone tries to mint and sell your art.

Did you read the parent post you just replied to? I guess not. It's ok, I'll copypaste it for you:

> I'm just pointing out that you wrote a very long answer to a question and your answer didn't even try to relate to the question that was asked.

This is the post that you're replying to. I find it ironic that you replied to this post with a run-of-the-mill crypto-is-bad rant that still doesn't answer the question that was asked.

> Maybe even the Pokemon cards as well

Dunno about Pokemon, but Magic cards may hold their value. There's a very limited number of sought after, rare items (Power 9, sealed boxes of early sets etc.) and millions of people who really enjoy the game. Some of them are bound to be wealthy and crazy collectors, who create demand beyond just pure speculation.

> - Meme stock investors intentionally manipulating stock prices to cause them to diverge from the underlying value of the company

You’re giving way too much credit to meme traders, their wallets, and their ability to move markets.

My understanding of the GameStop situation is that the stock's value had already diverged from the underlying value of the company, and the meme stock crowd noticed that and took advantage of it. Specifically, they saw that there were more short positions than total shares of existing stock, so they bought shares, thus causing a short squeeze. (This is possible because there's a power imbalance between the people who short a stock and the people who are long.)

The meme stock crowd didn't create the value/price imbalance (it was created by the short sellers), they just saw that it was already off and took advantage of the situation, so then the value imbalance swung the other way. And in the end GameStop as a company survived and are now doing pretty well as far as I'm aware. GME is trading at about $100 a share, which is a lot better than about $4 a share a couple years ago. Maybe that's an artificially inflated price, but who cares? As far as I can tell that's just the normal market consequence of too many people shorting a stock and someone calling their bluff.

No not really.

Its a lot of hard cash moving stock prices around without hedging, and that's before the secondary effect of algorithms amplification.

"People spending that stimulus money to invest (often for the first time) on zero-fee platforms like Robin Hood"

You mean people gambling and trading. Very few people engaging in these activities are really investing.

> Despite all of that, people who bought and held a total market or S&P 500 index fund in 2020 have still made gains.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Two years is a fairly short time to estimate market performance and corrections. We very well may be telling a different story in 15 years.

>The Fed juicing the market (and not stopping when it should have, dismissing inflation concerns as transitory, etc.)

Interest rates should've been raised much more aggressively in 2018 and they should not have been lowered in 2019.

Most importantly, the Fed Put that has been supporting markets since 2008 is unravelling.

> Meme stock investors intentionally manipulating stock prices to cause them to diverge from the underlying value of the company

I get what you’re saying but this point kind of implies that there was information symmetry, or even near-symmetry, between the market of investors and the underlying value of the company.

A few big players and the professionals maybe have their finger on this pulse. But they are still subject to many biases that amateurs are.

COVID stimulus certainly did go to people and businesses that didn't need it. Or didn't need as much of it as they got.

However, PPP didn't adequately cover some of the businesses that needed it the most.

Consider somebody who is bootstrapping a small business because they were packaged-out of their corporate job a year or two before the pandemic began. They couldn't afford to draw anything close to what they need to live on in the year prior to the pandemic. So the PPP payment formula didn't approximate their true needs.

People in that situation had no choice but to try for EIDL. But EIDL required income reported on a Schedule C or an 1120 / 1120S, and if you didn't have that because you were still finding the customers that could sustain the business, then in all likelihood your business either died an early death or came out of the deepest part of the crisis in much worse shape than when it began.

The fed should have stopped juicing the market as soon as the current boom seemingly began. We have no concept of loose monetary policy in bad times and tight in good times, just loose all the time now.

"Despite all of that, people who bought and held a total market or S&P 500 index fund in 2020 have still made gains."

For now.

It’s weird you didn’t mention the number one reason for all that. Millions of people with decent incomes and nothing to spend it on due to Covid, bored out of their minds and looking for something to do. Unfortunately for them they did something really stupid. At least nobody got hurt.

> - Covid stimulus going to people who didn't need it

You couldn't talk about this when it was taking place. Speech was stifled completely and universally.

We need to really think about how to allow dissent. Without it, society will spiral out of control by people that want to control it.

Can you give one example?

Pretty much every comment that mentioned this was flagged in the year 2020 well into 2021 on HN.

It was overwhelmingly clear.

I don’t think getting downvoted for spamming inflammatory political opinions on HN is the damning evidence of censorship conspiracy you think it is. Do you have examples of this? Did this happen anywhere besides HN?

You may want to question your own objectivity on this subject.

This is weird, I remember seeing discussion on along these lines that wasn't ever flagged. It sounds like you're speaking from experience, do you have an example of something you posted maybe?

That doesn't seem right, I remember people talking about it in pretty normal amounts since day 1.

> - Covid stimulus going to people who didn't need it

Bit of a spicy opinion... (but perfectly accurate)

There were definitely some missteps but given that these problems are global I don't think you can really pin it too tightly on any US policy. The main drivers by far are the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Both black swan events.

Don't hold your breath. You're 600 points away from 2020 pre-pandemic levels and the way everything is looking right now, you would be lucky if it doesn't bottom out lower.

The first and second point kind of cross each other.

Stimulus to people who need it (to spend) is inflationary. Stimulus to those who don't need it inflates stock prices.

Which part of it is "stupid" ? Please have some respect.

Add one more: 0DTE options and gamma squeezes.

Ok genius .. so now where will the money flow to? What .. you cannot think of anything? Well get ready for bull run again.

>- Meme stock investors intentionally manipulating stock prices to cause them to diverge from the underlying value of the company

That's the hang up. The USA is the only country in the world which lets the market naked short sell. It's not that the meme investors manipulated the system, it's the short sellers that manipulated it. All these funds figured gamestop was headed to the pinksheets during covid; a reasonable bet but too many fund managers got the same idea. They short sold more stock than exists. That's fraud, I wish I could sell nothing for money.

Other people noticed the disparity and simply started buying. Eventually these funds are basically forced to come to you to buy outside the market. They in person have to approach you unsolicited and offer to buy your stocks. It's going to be a blank cheque... but the SEC never punished them. These funds owe equivalently infinite money but aren't forced to pay.

They just let them be criminal. Wells fargo obviously saw where they were, basically infinite money in the negative so they bowed out in 2021. There are a bunch of others who are in the same position.

>Despite all of that, people who bought and held a total market or S&P 500 index fund in 2020 have still made gains.

I have a small position in S&P500 bought in late 2019 or so doing just fine. Im letting it ride, I expect it to drop another 50% or more.

However, something you missed in your list that nobody is talking about. Nobody owns S&P500. If you look at FTSE, TSX, various other indexes for other countries. They are healthy. Rich folks own their percentages of them all. Excluding obviously amazon or tesla which have their billionaires protecting.

AOS is a good example.

0.72% % of Shares Held by All Insider 98.87% % of Float Held by Institutions

If you check the S&P500, the supermajority of stocks are like this. Basically insiders dont want to touch the stock with a 10foot pole.

Basically the only people who own these stocks are suckers such as myself.

Mind you, every other country in the world is healthy right now. This is USA only.

There's no explanation. There's no 'I'm selling these stocks because of..."

So we have a broken stock market in the USA because some memers discovered the fraud.

We have some seriously bad economic health behind it as well as pretty major crash already happening.

Lets not forget the imminent civil war situation. Star Trek Strange New World literally said 2nd US civil war.

My recommendation? Dont be dealing with the USA stock markets at all; or accept the punishment. Ignore the meme stocks, ignore everything. Only buy stocks you see are of good value.

You missed one

- Forcibly shuttering the world economy over a bad cold while yammering on about a v-shaped recovering that increasingly looks like just as much nonsense as everything else from the last two years.

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