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Most big banks completely screwed their clients. You can read reddit/r/smallbusiness 1) The SBA was approving PPP submissions in like an hour (rubberstamping).

Most big banks completely screwed their clients. You can read reddit/r/smallbusiness 1) The SBA was approving PPP submissions in like an hour (rubberstamping). 2) Any delay was 100% your bank. Many banks just didnt get to applications but didnt notify people. Some banks said people were approved (by the bank) but didnt submit those people to the SBA 3) There was a lot of time to submit to intermediaries like paypal. Paypal was turning applications around in 24 hours to funding. There were people that applied on 4/3 with a big bank that didnt get it and people that applied thursday night through paypal that got it 4) Big banks often added additional criteria which made it harder to complete the application. Some big banks were not using the correct calculations 5) Once you have an SBA loan number you are good and money is allocated. Banks have 10 days to disburse the funds 6) The SBA ran out of allocated funds, not all the money has been disbursed. 7) People submitted to multiple lenders and it was fine Overall I think the program went pretty well and there was plenty of time for people to get applications in. There was obviously working of the system (hedge funds, large restaurant chains, etc) but if you look at the distribution of funds there were still many many small loans. 750K under $150K with an average of $51K I spent the last 2 weeks doing nothing but reading reports, stats etc about the program to ensure I was able to get it for my team. Lots of people submitted with a big bank and just waited accepting no updates, now are complaining after it is over.

listenallyall 7y ago
750,000 loans of $150,000 would use about $112 billion in funds -- less than 1/3rd of the allocated amount. But if, as you stated, the average loan was only $51,000, then these smaller loans comprised a much smaller piece of the total. The way the statistics are presented is purposefully designed to obfuscate the fact that the vast majority of funds went to large businesses while small ones were very often shut out.
- mbreese 7y ago
  This is definitely one instance where you care less about the average and more about the median (and quartile).
  - Misdicorl 7y ago
    Not when figuring out how much had been distributed
manigandham 7y ago
The entire purpose of banks is to provide financial services and assistance. There was tremendous confusion, warnings and even outright denial by many financial institutions in aiding businesses that tried to apply. I find it hard to blame the companies when they did everything right and the banks failed them.
- jhwang5 7y ago
  I think there's a widespread sentiment in this country where if you get screwed over, it's on you, you should've known better. Everyone just passes the buck. Well guess what, most people entrusted banks to do the right thing, why the hell else are you paying them for (with your deposits).
  - icelancer 7y ago
    >> most people entrusted banks to do the right thing This prevailing sentiment that banks/government/overlords will do the right thing has been mostly proven wrong time and time again. I don't agree with the top-level commenter's tone, but I understand the content. Putting faith in large business or bureaucracy of any kind is a recipe for disaster.
    - jhwang5 7y ago
      Yeah I get it, but consumers can theoretically fight back by pulling their deposits and going somewhere else. The problem is, all banks are intentionally incompetent, and starting a bank as a startup is hard due to barriers of entry. Wtf are we supposed to do?
      - salawat 7y ago
        Note: If everyone pulled all their deposits from all banks simultaneously, the financial sector would essentially collapse period. At this point, there is no one dollar for every deposit anymore. The system is based on statistical multiplexing which has the baked in assumption whereby the case that everyone cones demanding their money will never happen. It works for the most part until everyone gets to the point they want their assets. It's like dividing by 0, and there are a lot of people who will work very hard to frustrate any attempt to do so. They'll be very persuasive too. >Are you trying to cause civilization to collapse? >Do you not pike the standard of living you enjoy? >You don't like being able to feed yourself and your family too do you? The underpinnings of finance has been completely seperated from every experience for years, and if you even embark on a quest to understand them, you'll end up being confronted with the unsettling feeling that everything seems way more complicated and opaque than it needs to be. The jargon is nigh-impenetrable. The assumptionsand extrema very ill-conditioned, and it seems like the only reason we don't do anything to fundamentally change any dynamics of it seems to be that no one has any way of predicting the right way to go, but everyone seems to be capable of telling you that what you plan on doing will inevitably fail. A characteristic, I might add of a very poorly understood/conditioned system. And yes. I'm aware of the irony of my post being an example of the very thing I'm calling out. The difference is, I treat the financial system as what it fundamentally is. A statistical multiplexer; just like your internet uplink, just like telecommunications equipment, just like insurance. It takes a limited amount of physically money'd throughput, amplifies it via fractional reserve mechanisms, and as long as the entire system doesn't come for their money all at once, the system cranks along just fine. If they do, you have a bank run, game over for the financial system. My major issue is the discussion always stops there. I want to know what the hell next steps are, because it seems damn irresponsible and cowardly to me that the powers that be are more than happy to perpetuate a system that keeps them on top, but are seemingly incapable of being depended upon to take any intellectual/political risk when it comes to acknowledging failure states happen. The furthest I've traced out, is bank run happens, FDIC kicks in, Federal Reserve picks up the onus as lender of last resort for banks. Woopdie doo. The Fed also seems to have the authority to wave minimal capital reserve requirements, so really they can do basically whatever they seem to want in the absence of other solvent banks. And make no mistake, the U.S. can still screw the pooch in servicing all those treasuries the rest of the world has a penchant for parking money in. The question is, what then? >Do we just say, "Nah? Not happening?" >Renegotiate? >Inflate away? As the world reserve currency, we're supposedly the only one in a position to do that as long as we can defend the political circumstances granting the dollar that status. >Declare "Come and take it?" With our military, and a large enough group of people in the grips of a sudden surge of patriotism, the United States could still theoretically get by with defending itself from outright military action, but the diplomatic damage done to the country's reputation would be a smoking crater in the short term. >Try something completely different? The knock on effects aren't trivial, but they are there. One of the most important lessons I've learned in life is that just because you've ignored a problem doesn't make it go away. As a society, we've ignored this problem for many years. Banking is about trust first and foremost. If you can't trust the person you're lending to/depositing with, you're done. Your capability to organize is shot. The money changing hands in one amount vs. another isn't anywhere nearas important as the trust that makes I'll give you this piece of paper for the thing I need, then you can give it to someone else for what you need. In a way, these times are brought about by the compounding interest of lies as applied to our economic framework. I'm not entirely convinced that in the end, the solution won't end up being something along the lines of getting the biggest con man on the planet to pitch a nonsense idea in a way that convinces everyone, and just make horrible things happen to people who are unfortunate enough to call it out as bollocks. At least that seems to have been the modus operandi thus far as best as I can get anyone to not answer. (I.e. continual refusal to answer a question as asked). I really do hope there is someone out there who legitimately gets it, but I'm not entirely convinced the whole thing isn't some odd society-scale macro-thought, uncontemplable in it's entirety by an individual, but nevertheless played out/manifested by collective behavior. Once you hit that point of complexity though what any one person says is meaningless, and what everyone does is what is important. So talking about it seems pointless; as frustrating to me as that is to me as a person who believes any system should be able to be rendered into an articulable description. Anywho... Breakfast time. If you've read to this point, I apologize. I did start this post with the best of intentions. It just seems to have spiralled into incomprehensability. EDIT: I hate economics. I can get some use out of it when it focuses on being descriptive of its field of study, but I find its purported predictive aspects to be sorely lacking. EDIT2: When I use them most of the time. And not even consistently so, which would apparently be amazing.
hughw 7y ago
>I spent the last 2 weeks doing nothing but reading reports, stats etc about the program to ensure I was able to get it for my team. Lots of people submitted with a big bank and just waited accepting no updates, now are complaining after it is over. Hi. Joe citizen here. Congratulations on your ability to work the system. I'm in the category you deprecate, just a loser needing my big bank to run interference for me and get us our $52k. Our business did not halt and allow me to devote full time to the endeavor. The future will be run by you.
- hughw 7y ago
  Nothing like smug HN downvotes to reinforce the Darwinian message.
  - tlrobinson 7y ago
    > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - hughw 7y ago
      It was more than a complaint about downvotes. It was an observation on an unflattering characteristic of parts of the HN community.
      - kylebenzle 7y ago
        Smug people apparently don't like being called smug.
- streb-lo 7y ago
  Yup. Absolute insanity that people think this is OK.
GarrisonPrime 7y ago
My business bank (Wells Fargo) didn't even begin taking applications until the day before the money ran out. My personal bank (Bank of America) flat-out refused to talk to me, since I'd never had a business credit or loan through them. Quickbooks is apparently planning something, but of course have nothing ready yet. PayPal never mentioned to me they were an option. I've logged into my business account with them daily since this all began. Not a peep. Not an email. Not a notification anywhere on the page. Nada. I scoured the SBA page daily - hell, three times a day - checking up on my EIDL application and also looking for any update on them offering PPP. Never saw anything, despite many people asserting like you are that it was there all along and early. It's like you're from a completely different reality.
- dannyw 7y ago
  SBA should have just distributed the money directly without overhead. A year later, we can hire lots of investigators to verify the loans and pursue any fraud.
  - mikeyouse 7y ago
    I’ve always thought it would make sense to attach specific penalties to this type of legislation. Something akin to “If you lie on an application, your loans won’t be forgiven and you will need to pay a 50% penalty. If you’re a bank and you knowingly facilitate this fraud, you will lose Federal backing for the loans and your employees and executives will be subject to minimum 1 year sentences in Federal custody.” It’s unfortunate we live in such a weird carceral state yet white collar crimes that would probably be the type most deterred by the threat of prison are so rarely prosecuted.
    - sseveran 7y ago
      If those kind of risks were imposed on banks they would only work with businesses they knew very well or not at all. As it is there were significant questions from the banks side on what they would be liable for if the loan was ultimately found to be invalid, or fraud.
silencio 7y ago
This is pretty infuriating to read when I spent so much fucking time with three different banks and my accountant over three weeks to prep and apply and I’m still unsure what the situation is in my case. All on top of just keeping my restaurant afloat and keeping my employees safe, while I have a newborn, while the world is on fire and favorite customers come by crying about losing their jobs and fuck, what’s the rainy day fund for if not for commiserating six feet apart after giving them a free burger. So yeah I guess I just sat on my fat ass for weeks and I shouldn’t be complaining.......?
- zcbn898ppn 7y ago
  I bet you’re the sort who ignores politics 90% of the time “Free markets, man, not my job, cut taxes, why organize collectively, that’s fascism, I ain’t paying for others!” Murica. How’s that rugged individualism, living among all those exceptional people going? Richest country in history is effectively a failed state internally. Pointing big guns, shouting LOL NO we do what we want isn’t working?

listenallyall 7y ago

750,000 loans of $150,000 would use about $112 billion in funds -- less than 1/3rd of the allocated amount. But if, as you stated, the average loan was only $51,000, then these smaller loans comprised a much smaller piece of the total. The way the statistics are presented is purposefully designed to obfuscate the fact that the vast majority of funds went to large businesses while small ones were very often shut out.

mbreese 7y ago
This is definitely one instance where you care less about the average and more about the median (and quartile).
- Misdicorl 7y ago
  Not when figuring out how much had been distributed

manigandham 7y ago

The entire purpose of banks is to provide financial services and assistance. There was tremendous confusion, warnings and even outright denial by many financial institutions in aiding businesses that tried to apply. I find it hard to blame the companies when they did everything right and the banks failed them.

jhwang5 7y ago
I think there's a widespread sentiment in this country where if you get screwed over, it's on you, you should've known better. Everyone just passes the buck. Well guess what, most people entrusted banks to do the right thing, why the hell else are you paying them for (with your deposits).
- icelancer 7y ago
  >> most people entrusted banks to do the right thing This prevailing sentiment that banks/government/overlords will do the right thing has been mostly proven wrong time and time again. I don't agree with the top-level commenter's tone, but I understand the content. Putting faith in large business or bureaucracy of any kind is a recipe for disaster.
  - jhwang5 7y ago
    Yeah I get it, but consumers can theoretically fight back by pulling their deposits and going somewhere else. The problem is, all banks are intentionally incompetent, and starting a bank as a startup is hard due to barriers of entry. Wtf are we supposed to do?
    - salawat 7y ago
      Note: If everyone pulled all their deposits from all banks simultaneously, the financial sector would essentially collapse period. At this point, there is no one dollar for every deposit anymore. The system is based on statistical multiplexing which has the baked in assumption whereby the case that everyone cones demanding their money will never happen. It works for the most part until everyone gets to the point they want their assets. It's like dividing by 0, and there are a lot of people who will work very hard to frustrate any attempt to do so. They'll be very persuasive too. >Are you trying to cause civilization to collapse? >Do you not pike the standard of living you enjoy? >You don't like being able to feed yourself and your family too do you? The underpinnings of finance has been completely seperated from every experience for years, and if you even embark on a quest to understand them, you'll end up being confronted with the unsettling feeling that everything seems way more complicated and opaque than it needs to be. The jargon is nigh-impenetrable. The assumptionsand extrema very ill-conditioned, and it seems like the only reason we don't do anything to fundamentally change any dynamics of it seems to be that no one has any way of predicting the right way to go, but everyone seems to be capable of telling you that what you plan on doing will inevitably fail. A characteristic, I might add of a very poorly understood/conditioned system. And yes. I'm aware of the irony of my post being an example of the very thing I'm calling out. The difference is, I treat the financial system as what it fundamentally is. A statistical multiplexer; just like your internet uplink, just like telecommunications equipment, just like insurance. It takes a limited amount of physically money'd throughput, amplifies it via fractional reserve mechanisms, and as long as the entire system doesn't come for their money all at once, the system cranks along just fine. If they do, you have a bank run, game over for the financial system. My major issue is the discussion always stops there. I want to know what the hell next steps are, because it seems damn irresponsible and cowardly to me that the powers that be are more than happy to perpetuate a system that keeps them on top, but are seemingly incapable of being depended upon to take any intellectual/political risk when it comes to acknowledging failure states happen. The furthest I've traced out, is bank run happens, FDIC kicks in, Federal Reserve picks up the onus as lender of last resort for banks. Woopdie doo. The Fed also seems to have the authority to wave minimal capital reserve requirements, so really they can do basically whatever they seem to want in the absence of other solvent banks. And make no mistake, the U.S. can still screw the pooch in servicing all those treasuries the rest of the world has a penchant for parking money in. The question is, what then? >Do we just say, "Nah? Not happening?" >Renegotiate? >Inflate away? As the world reserve currency, we're supposedly the only one in a position to do that as long as we can defend the political circumstances granting the dollar that status. >Declare "Come and take it?" With our military, and a large enough group of people in the grips of a sudden surge of patriotism, the United States could still theoretically get by with defending itself from outright military action, but the diplomatic damage done to the country's reputation would be a smoking crater in the short term. >Try something completely different? The knock on effects aren't trivial, but they are there. One of the most important lessons I've learned in life is that just because you've ignored a problem doesn't make it go away. As a society, we've ignored this problem for many years. Banking is about trust first and foremost. If you can't trust the person you're lending to/depositing with, you're done. Your capability to organize is shot. The money changing hands in one amount vs. another isn't anywhere nearas important as the trust that makes I'll give you this piece of paper for the thing I need, then you can give it to someone else for what you need. In a way, these times are brought about by the compounding interest of lies as applied to our economic framework. I'm not entirely convinced that in the end, the solution won't end up being something along the lines of getting the biggest con man on the planet to pitch a nonsense idea in a way that convinces everyone, and just make horrible things happen to people who are unfortunate enough to call it out as bollocks. At least that seems to have been the modus operandi thus far as best as I can get anyone to not answer. (I.e. continual refusal to answer a question as asked). I really do hope there is someone out there who legitimately gets it, but I'm not entirely convinced the whole thing isn't some odd society-scale macro-thought, uncontemplable in it's entirety by an individual, but nevertheless played out/manifested by collective behavior. Once you hit that point of complexity though what any one person says is meaningless, and what everyone does is what is important. So talking about it seems pointless; as frustrating to me as that is to me as a person who believes any system should be able to be rendered into an articulable description. Anywho... Breakfast time. If you've read to this point, I apologize. I did start this post with the best of intentions. It just seems to have spiralled into incomprehensability. EDIT: I hate economics. I can get some use out of it when it focuses on being descriptive of its field of study, but I find its purported predictive aspects to be sorely lacking. EDIT2: When I use them most of the time. And not even consistently so, which would apparently be amazing.

hughw 7y ago

>I spent the last 2 weeks doing nothing but reading reports, stats etc about the program to ensure I was able to get it for my team. Lots of people submitted with a big bank and just waited accepting no updates, now are complaining after it is over. Hi. Joe citizen here. Congratulations on your ability to work the system. I'm in the category you deprecate, just a loser needing my big bank to run interference for me and get us our $52k. Our business did not halt and allow me to devote full time to the endeavor. The future will be run by you.

hughw 7y ago
Nothing like smug HN downvotes to reinforce the Darwinian message.
- tlrobinson 7y ago
  > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - hughw 7y ago
    It was more than a complaint about downvotes. It was an observation on an unflattering characteristic of parts of the HN community.
    - kylebenzle 7y ago
      Smug people apparently don't like being called smug.
streb-lo 7y ago
Yup. Absolute insanity that people think this is OK.

GarrisonPrime 7y ago

My business bank (Wells Fargo) didn't even begin taking applications until the day before the money ran out. My personal bank (Bank of America) flat-out refused to talk to me, since I'd never had a business credit or loan through them. Quickbooks is apparently planning something, but of course have nothing ready yet. PayPal never mentioned to me they were an option. I've logged into my business account with them daily since this all began. Not a peep. Not an email. Not a notification anywhere on the page. Nada. I scoured the SBA page daily - hell, three times a day - checking up on my EIDL application and also looking for any update on them offering PPP. Never saw anything, despite many people asserting like you are that it was there all along and early. It's like you're from a completely different reality.

dannyw 7y ago
SBA should have just distributed the money directly without overhead. A year later, we can hire lots of investigators to verify the loans and pursue any fraud.
- mikeyouse 7y ago
  I’ve always thought it would make sense to attach specific penalties to this type of legislation. Something akin to “If you lie on an application, your loans won’t be forgiven and you will need to pay a 50% penalty. If you’re a bank and you knowingly facilitate this fraud, you will lose Federal backing for the loans and your employees and executives will be subject to minimum 1 year sentences in Federal custody.” It’s unfortunate we live in such a weird carceral state yet white collar crimes that would probably be the type most deterred by the threat of prison are so rarely prosecuted.
  - sseveran 7y ago
    If those kind of risks were imposed on banks they would only work with businesses they knew very well or not at all. As it is there were significant questions from the banks side on what they would be liable for if the loan was ultimately found to be invalid, or fraud.

silencio 7y ago

This is pretty infuriating to read when I spent so much fucking time with three different banks and my accountant over three weeks to prep and apply and I’m still unsure what the situation is in my case. All on top of just keeping my restaurant afloat and keeping my employees safe, while I have a newborn, while the world is on fire and favorite customers come by crying about losing their jobs and fuck, what’s the rainy day fund for if not for commiserating six feet apart after giving them a free burger. So yeah I guess I just sat on my fat ass for weeks and I shouldn’t be complaining.......?

zcbn898ppn 7y ago
I bet you’re the sort who ignores politics 90% of the time “Free markets, man, not my job, cut taxes, why organize collectively, that’s fascism, I ain’t paying for others!” Murica. How’s that rugged individualism, living among all those exceptional people going? Richest country in history is effectively a failed state internally. Pointing big guns, shouting LOL NO we do what we want isn’t working?