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It’s such a dumb narrative to blame banks and individual businesses for this when the Treasury was the one that launched a poorly designed and ambiguous program
by tempsy 7y ago
It’s such a dumb narrative to blame banks and individual businesses for this when the Treasury was the one that launched a poorly designed and ambiguous program that was open to interpretation and was clearly underfunded to begin with.
For example, a restaurant chain with less 500 workers per location qualified as a small business. Is there any restaurant in the world that has 500 workers in one location? Even if there was would that be “bigger” than a chain with, say, 50 locations with 50 employees each?
It is strange to expect a business to anticipate that the funds would run out and factor that in to determining whether it would be “fair” to apply if you qualified.
- preoccupied1985 7y agoWhat's strange to me is this idea that the normal anger response to greed is somehow irrational. Anger leads to laws and punishment, which changes the incentive structure.
- MivLives 7y agoWhile it's definitely a ridiculous bar, one the things that shocked me about working at a grocery store is how many employees worked there. I think there were around 300-400 depending on the time of year. This wasn't even that massive a store. Not saying that restaurants have that many, just that it can be deceptive how many employees a store has.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoGrocery stores are notorious for over-staffing and then giving people very few hours, treating them like crap and telling them they'll cut their hours further if they complain. But yeah, any business that is open ~18hr/day and has to keep thousands of square feet of shelved stocked throughout that time is gonna have to have a lot of people.
- coldcode 7y agoEach Chili's if I remember correctly has about 150 people total. Pei Wei's tend to be around 50 or so. Those are the only two I vaguely recall being told by someone.
- koheripbal 7y agoThis is kind of unfair given the timeline that they were asked to launch this in.
- downerending 7y agoDid the Treasury blow it, or did Congress blow it?
- res0nat0r 7y agoBoth.
- texasbigdata 7y agoThat wasn't the point of this. These businesses are labor heavy and suffered 80% revenue declines. Widening the acceptance (and it was the 72 exclusion not the 500 that mattered) allowed for unemployment to be substituted for loan dollars. Your 50x50 example is also not relevant as there is a loan cap.
- tathougies 7y agoWhile the treasury can be blamed for advising. The amount of funding is completely and absolutely up to congress.
- mikhailfranco 7y agoYou miss the entire point: it's not a mistake, it's the plan! The Congress, the Fed and the Treasury are coordinating a bail-out of large companies, banks, landlords and Wall Street. Paying money to citizens is only so they can pay their rent and mortgages (to ... you guessed). Buying corporate bonds bails out companies and their executives, but also relieves the credit lines and Revolvers that have been draining the banks. So companies are now raising more bonds to sell to the Fed, to pay back the Revolvers - just as thy sold bonds to buy back stock and reward execs since 2008. It's all corrupt crony capitalism. If you add a bit of civil asset forfeiture, abolition of constitutional rights (esp. at borders), the surveillance state, privacy-trampling intelligence agencies, militarization of law enforcement, protectionism and a smattering of xenophobia, you get fascism.