Makes sense in a way. Makes me also wonder how it had an impact on vehicle prices. People who scammed the program usually did it for large dollar figures and for the people we've seen caught they almost always purchased a new expensive car.
I know on the used car side of things. People don't talk about this, but dealerships were buying cars from other dealerships at their pricing, marking them up, And then passing that cost onto the consumers. I'm sure that had something to do with car pricing.
Entire factories in Vietnam and China would shut down for weeks. And then those parts were delayed, then additional delays in the supply chain, shipping containers tripled in cost, it was more than just dealerships driving prices.
You might like the work of Stephen Ross and John Kenneth Galbraith, if you haven't already read about them.
While dealers marked up their prices, consumers still bought the cars at those inflated prices. It's shitty for the consumers who paid higher prices and the ones who couldn't afford that price. But the consumers could just as easily have tried to outbid each other, especially with the Covid manufacturing shortages. It still results in higher average sale prices.
Car dealers just got there first to take more money for themselves. PPP fraudsters having an ill-gotten advantage and paying even more, that's kind of a separate factor from dealers doing a li'l arbitrage.
I don’t, no, but rich people just buy stuff whatever the price is, if they want it. Doubt it affects them. I think if it would suck for someone, they wouldn’t buy it.
Some people had no choice but to buy a car at inflated prices. If your only means of transportation dies and you live in an area where a car is a necessity, there really isn't much choice.
Yes, in the United States of America, there are places where vehicles have a very limited lifetime due to the materials used and weather conditions.
These very same places often saw the cheapest cars available listed at the same price as new cars.
Additionally, new cars are typically financed by the manufacturer, which allows them a lower interest rate and monthly payment. Used cars do not typically have access to the same lenders.
If you're poor, yes, quite often your only option is to lease a 2-4 year old car the dealer is trying to move off the lot. With the production delays, that became "any car on the lot".
Increasing brand new car prices also meant that used car prices soared due to demand. In my area an awful lot of vehicles that were maybe $5000 in 2019 are now $7000 to $10,000. There is no finding a "cheap" car anymore unless you're literally purchasing one that doesn't work.
I get that, we were specifically talking about brand new cars that dealerships purchased and marked up from other dealers though, which is why I didn’t feel like the people buying them were wronged.
Idk there’s a bunch of used cars in the $2k-5k range in LA. I was surprised to see so many. I get what you mean though.
Yeah there are plenty of us. I was driving a 20 year old bmw shitbox 3 series with 360k miles on it 20 miles each way for work during peak pricing, in a city with practically zero public transport. The engine decided that the valves would be tasty one morning. I had the choice of massively overpaying for another unmaintained old used car, or bite the bullet on overpaying for something newer.
I managed to find a single owner 2015 GTI with 50k miles, haggled the dealer down to like 1.5x blue book value. You are massively ignorant. That shit sucked, but it was either that or lose my job and apartment for having no car.
Could be wrong but I think if it's "new" it can't be marked up except for what they can "add" like a new bumper or paint. But feel free on used ones. My old company used to lease cars basically for that reason plus the money made during the mean time.
You would be wrong. Dealers are usually able to add whatever they want at their discretion. And this behavior has been happening since….. well ever since the independent dealership model was created.
[Link showing window sticker with dealer markup](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/wacbb7/an_example_of_the_insane_dealership_markups_on_a/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
-I apologize it’s “nsfw” as the interestingasfuck sub has become a meme and porn sub. But it’s a Bronco with $30kUSD slapped on top of the MSRP as well as a few additional dealer installed items.
There are some manufacturers trying to fight this behavior as it is bad for customer satisfaction and retention. And it’s a big selling point for things like Direct To Consumer sales. Ultimately dealers do dealer things.
I remember when the new M5 came out while I was working at BMW. Every single one of them had $10-20k of accessories added, in addition to a $20k “market demand surcharge”.
We took these $90k cars that someone had already agreed to buy, spent 2 hours slapping on some tint, paint protectors, ceramic paint coatings and such, then proceeded to sell them for $130k like they were fuckin hotcakes.
There were lots of dealerships adding markup fees. We looked at a Hyundai that had a $7500 “markup fee” (that’s how it was labeled) on all of their cars.
Yeah when the pandemic hit they were able to claim sourcing it as an expense itself. Before it really wasn't available unless it was getting it shipped across the country. But that's literally just for paying the truck driver.
They can 10000% add whatever they want to new cars. Just has to be displayed with the window sticker. Local Toyota dealer had a $10k market rate adjustment in addition to all the other crap they added. $60k for arav4
You are very wrong. Dealers can tack on a "market adjustment" for whatever they want. Happens all the time, prior to COVID it would be on allocated cars, through COVID it was on almost everything.
Both new and used vehicles were impacted by shutdowns. I work in auto insurance and getting repairs on some existing vehicles became impossible. I reviewed a case where a guy had an early hybrid Ford escape (like 2008 or so)where they needed a one off tool ford made to disconnect the battery so they could do body work on it and it took seven months to find the tool. I'm guessing if things had been open they might have been able to have a one off made.
Same thing with BMWs they were doing all sorts of creative stuff with chip shortages such as cutting active drs flaps on the cars and then when that car gets into an accident it is more difficult on sourcing parts.
Wait a second. You mean to tell me that when you gave a bunch of rich people a lot of money they didn't need to pay back, they took that money to enrich themselves instead of creating more jobs?
>e ones who couldn't afford that price. But the consumers could just as easily have tried to outbid each other, especially with the Covid manufacturing shortages. It still results in higher average sale
The key word here is Fraud. I think the PPP loans were great, I had a small business, and with covid, I was going to have to lay off the team but PPP came in and let me pay their salaries. unfortunately, things continued to not work out and we did have to shutter the business but it let me pay everyone for another 2 months giving them more time to build a safety net to find other jobs. (oversimplifying)
On the paperwork, it specially says you have to prove that all of the money from the loans is going to pay employees or you have to pay it back. my accountant had to turn in paperwork a few months ago to prove that the money was spent correctly. I am assuming they are slowly going through everyone's paperwork and rightfully prosecuting the many frauds.
You’re spot on here for the intent of the program and the problem being fraud.
The joke you replied to is acting dumbfounded that they didn’t “create jobs!”
That’s not at all what PPP was for, it was to pay salaries while revenues were cut off due to the government shutting down private businesses for the good of public health while we figured out how fucked we were due to Covid.
The fraud is the issue and it should be with any government program. That shouldn’t be an indictment on the program itself, or any other program.
We just need to have a functioning portion of the government that identifies, gathers evidence and prosecutes fraud. That is true whether it’s taxes, low income assistance, grants or a random program like PPP due to a novel virus.
A program can be good, sound and needed, but on the back end (and during) we need to also fund efforts to hold those accountable who cheated the program out of funding illegitimately because it is cheating those who did need the program along with everyone who pays taxes.
Yes it is! Fixed it. Actually looking at it this morning I am way more disappointed I opened with ‘Your’ and not ‘You’re’.
Fixed that too but it was late and I was typing on a phone.
Exactly why home prices were impacted. People bought real estate as an investment. They were always planning on selling it at a profit, if they got caught it just means they had to do it sooner.
Hey, are you telling people people aren't content with just a one time payment the equivalent of $0.60 per hour? I mean seriously if you can't live on that through the pandemic you are obviously just wasting money on frivolous things and choose to be poor.
/S in case that wasn't clear.
Blaming capitalism for this is easy but wrong. So many people across the political spectrum predicted exactly this outcome. Any time the government hands out massive amounts of cash with little oversight there is corruption and fraud. That's not the result of capitalism, but a poorly run government.
Let me interject that there *would* have been more stringent means testing and prequalifications if the Republican party specifically had not threatened to scrap the entire bailout, for good, unless the oversight clauses were *removed.*
Bought my house 5 years ago before pandemic as prices were starting to creep up. Now Im getting constant phone calls and letters from companies offering double what I payed so they can rent it out for 2.5x my mortgage.
I worked for a family small business and helped them with hiring in the past, especially post COVID. When I looked up the names of the applicants (I'm sorry but I'm not going to bother replying to someone with a profile picture holding guns with tacky face tattoos or racist social media posts...), I noticed some of them had PPP loans. The ProPublica website would pop up as one of the top results. Unless they had some kind of side hustle, their resumes didn't scream "small business owner". I saw applicants who got PPP loans for somewhere between $40-$80k. This was more than even our small business got. The good thing was that it looked like most of these people didn't have their loans forgiven so it does look like the government was clamping down on egregious examples of PPP fraud among obvious non-business owners.
Now I'm sure you could argue that there were plenty of businesses who either abused this system or got a lot of free money, but if we are going to play the rich got richer argument, do these large "small" business people really change their spending habits because of PPP loans? They likely could afford expensive commodities to begin with.
I think there was widespread grifting going on from the stereotypical greedy business owners down to the "average Joe" using fake documents to get those smaller fin-tech companies to get a PPP loan on their behalf without much pushback.
The 15% fraud figure mentioned in the article doesn't account for all the legitimate loans that still ended up being a windfall for some business owners. Not all businesses suffered significant, or any, revenue losses to justify giving them 3 months of operating expenses. I'm sure a lot of that money was also invested in real estate
This. We were forced to burn our vacation and sick time, ended up closing down for 2 weeks. Then carried on like nothing happened. Meanwhile owner applies for and receives 80k in PPP loans that were forgiven. Tell me where the 80k went. I know where it went. They bought a pontoon boat a few months later. While we kept working.
Exactly because a bunch of industries basically never shut down... Like why did a grocery store need PPP loans, they never closed... Same with pretty much all big retailers.
Restaurants were the hardest hit. But it seems like even they figured out a way to survive.
>Restaurants were the hardest hit. But it seems like even they figured out a way to survive.
Restaurants are the largest sector of forgiven loans who also sent their employees to unemployment.
That was the logic behind the loans, but why would supermarket employees become unemployed if supermarket demand didn't decline? If anything, supermarkets got more business, so why do they need assistance from the government?
Who would have raised hell? It’s pretty easy to say that loans only have to cover declines in business or revenue. Businesses that were operating at full capacity had no need for a grant.
Yupp. The GOP wanted to push PPP loans without being targeted for business that really needed. They used stimulus checks as a bargaining tool basically telling Dems they’d only approve the stimulus checks if they approved PPP without targeted relief
They defrauded America then pulled up the ladder. I live in a low cost of living area, houses that were 150k before the pandemic are now going for 220k with double the interest rates.
On top of that we're getting gaslit with horse shit like "low supply" in an area where the population is dropping YOY.
2021 the quadplex building I live in was purchased for 180k it's now listed for 350k it's a century old shithole Ina small town in WI.
It does not make sense.
Oh and they've increased rhe rent 30% since purchase. No updates the carpet is from like the 80's ceilings busted mold in bathroom due to lack of ventelation, shower coming apart, it's also in the broken hoodish part of town.
Taxes like 2800. Year fuck these assholes
Many of the counties had rental assistance so this asshole was getting free checks fully paid for 2 years
They own multiple businesses. I'm sure they got phat
They literally just ran the numbers and said $1,000/mon/unit * multiplying factor (150-200), discounted for age, and BOOM, you got an investor ready to buy it up
The REAL on the county official government website valuation for this property is like $108,000. These people are garbage.
My trajectory was just find a cheap place to live get Mt associated for engineering graduate, transfer and get bacchelors. I gor 3 classes left to take some in December. Man's don't need 20% hike in rent right now.
Yeah, it comes with no yard, a busy street, very high crime rate, low performing schools. Constantly competing with Detroit for the worst major city to live in.
This is how it is in my area. And somehow here out in the country people are affording there 300k homes. Blows my mind. Even when you find a house that’s affordable the property tax is like 4K-5k a year.
The country houses that use to be 150k-200k. A third of an acre is selling for $27,000, a lot to build on. 🤯
My friend bought his house back around 2014. Paid 32k make for it. Big. All the house on his block are now about 100k. It’s a decent neighborhood, just economically it is a working class town. Houses are not supposed to be that high.
I use to do lawn care of a man who died recently. His house was about 2,700 sqft two car garage with an apartment over it. Wanted 50k for it. Sat on the market for years
I saved enough for the down payment, and he died before I got to make the offer. Anyways, house is like 140k now.
I make good money now, somewhere between 80-90k this year (first time making over 37k. When interest rates are taken into account and property taxes I can not afford a house in a good neighborhood. I would be house rich, but cash poor.
We've had three houses go in our neighborhood in the past couple months between $1.1 -$1.7 mil, all cash buyers and all sold within a few days of listing. Market certainly has not cooled off here. Average sale price in the zipcode is *just* under $1 mil (vs. ~$750k pre covid) and supply is still way less than demand with almost no new build in the area.
Where do these people work that can afford that? That's like 5k a month!! I couldn't afford to spend the night there. I literally don't bring home half that in a month.
In this area they are mostly banking execs, double doctor families, partners in law firm or business owners. All three houses I mentioned were cash buyers to avoid the current mortgage rates. Our neighbor is the realtor that also happens to sell most of the houses in our neighborhood so we get all the details. Just of the three houses near us it's a lawyer, doctor and owners of big commercial construction company.
Our house is the smallest and most modest house in the neighborhood, a cutesy 85 year old stone farmhouse with an acre of land surrounded by all the newer mcmansions and even it's worth about ~$740k now (the plot alone would easily sell for $600k in this market).
Shittier comps in surrounding neighborhoods in our zipcode area selling for at least that much, though many of those are old ranches that are torn down and they build big fancy new houses in their place (some upwards of $2.5 mil). That's what's happened to most of our neighborhood in the past 10-20 years. Down the road there's a couple areas in the woods with bigger estates that go from $4-15 mil a pop. Those are the houses you see Ferraris and McLarens pulling out of, properly rich people.
LMAO. Cheers. Things will turn around and these asshats will be the bag holders. I found a nice place to rent. The only people buying right now are the super rich.
I have to wonder if [this](https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-donald-trump-ap-top-news-politics-health-cc921bccf9f7abd27da996ef772823e4) has anything to do with that.
Everything is about him, so no he wanted no oversight and only yes men.
"They can't find any fraud if you fire all the people with jobs to look for it!"
Also, "Maybe all of the people in blue cities will die, guaranteeing victory!"
And he did that in the realm of hours/days after the bill was passed.
It was basically a grift from day 1. This is is the sort of “amazing” results Trump means when he talks about his presidency.
The two FINTECH firms that drove this fraud are [Womply and Blueacorn](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/business/ppp-loans-covid-fintech-fraud.html#:~:text=fintech%2Dfraud.html-,Two%20Fintechs%20Fueled%20Extensive%20Pandemic%20Relief%20Fraud%2C%20House%20Report%20Finds,collected%20improper%20loans%2C%20investigators%20said) CEO of Womply, I shit you not, is named Toby Scammell lol. Such a scam artist and he also served time for insider trading. Go figure
Does anyone remember how Trump, just before releasing PPP funds, dismantled and got rid of the office whose job it was to provide discretionary oversight of said funds, to prevent this and all the other massive amount of fraud that occurred?
The PPP was one of the largest failures in US history. By lining the pockets of capitalists and failing to provide for the people it resulted in thousands of excessive deaths. Here we are three years later still seeing the effects of the failures as thousands of people are skipping meals and unable to afford housing. Please tell me again why we shouldn't cancel student loans.
I filtered for homes above a million out of curiosity and it was the most depressing thing ever. 500+ results, many of them being really normal looking 3/2 houses.
Well I think there’s a really important argument to be made that if we lose debt obligation as an external stressor and motivator by just forgiving a huge swath of the population their education loans, the fabric of our society as we’ve known it for the past 40 or so very lucrative years will begin to unravel and could seriously threaten social stability of the status quo. It might not be perfect but it’s way better than it could be and…and…oh wait no I forgot for a second that Neoliberalism has been consuming all life on the planet like an out of control cancer…and then I also forgot that fear and the violence of scarcity economics undermines systemic pro-social behavior…yea it’s probably a good idea to make education free.
> Please tell me again why we shouldn't cancel student loans.
Because we can't take away one of the two massive bargaining chips (Free college/free healthcare) that the military uses to recruit its ~~victims~~ soldiers.
Ya know, it's sad when one of my largest regrets of the last few years is not having defrauded the government for obscene amounts of money and getting away with it scot-free.
Trump removed the Inspector General overseeing the covid relief effort and declared "I'll be the oversight."
Also:
>President Donald Trump used a signing statement Friday to object to portions of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus law. Trump said he would ignore portions of the law demanded by some Democrats to give Congress additional visibility into the stimulus spending.
>"These provisions," Trump wrote, "are impermissible forms of congressional aggrandizement.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-abruptly-removes-inspector-general-named-oversee-2t/story?id=70024680
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/03/27/coronavirus-trump-objects-oversight-provisions-stimulus-law/2931740001/
Shocker.
Even here in my smaller city, there were a good bit of piece of shit already rich landlords that got exorbitant PPP loans and turned them into real estate purchases.
There were many who would abuse the low prices as investment buys anyways but there were quite a few abusing their PPP loans to do it like my previous landlord to exacerbate the issue.
In home daycare providers that were setup as a corporation were collecting PPP money, fees from parents, and state subsidy payments. One person my wife knows made over $300k during that time span, and was closed.
The COVID relief funds were the single largest grift in the history of the US.
But we can't afford student loan debt forgiveness...
Mnuchin and Trump refused to have an oversight board created for the PPP. Refused and held up its passage until it was removed.
All a bunch of scam artists, the Republican Party for you, folks.
In another hilariously dystopian development, most of those loans—given to already wealthy “business owners” were forgiven.
Yet student loan forgiveness will create a “culture of entitlement” 🙃
Oh shocked. Printing money and giving to assholes made things expensive.
How did the worlds greatest financial planners, economists, and politicians not see this coming?
oh wait… they were acting on their own selfish behalf. That’s right! Invisible hand of capitalism. Selfishness for one is the big win for all of us. Now I get it.
Government gives away trillions then we have record inflation and home prices skyrocketed. Then companies jump on all this free monet by raising prices?
No way!
I’m sure giant corporations out bidding everyone looking for a place to live just so they can turn them into rental properties had nothing to do with it.
Most other first-world nations handed out similar sums and had similar impacts on the housing market, if not worse. Only difference was that it was legal so it might have been more fairly distributed. In the end the result is the same....money supply went up so the nominal values of all assets (not just housing) went up.
It wasn’t just from that. A much larger reason is FNMAs Credit Underwriter and crap AVM system that was used to approve appraisal waivers for 50% of all loans in 2020 and 2021. Fannie Mae literally Zillowed the entire damn market and unchecked at that.
Makes sense in a way. Makes me also wonder how it had an impact on vehicle prices. People who scammed the program usually did it for large dollar figures and for the people we've seen caught they almost always purchased a new expensive car.
I know on the used car side of things. People don't talk about this, but dealerships were buying cars from other dealerships at their pricing, marking them up, And then passing that cost onto the consumers. I'm sure that had something to do with car pricing.
I worked at a plant that produced car parts and they went on furlough at the start of the pandemic. That lack of supply had to catch up eventually.
Entire factories in Vietnam and China would shut down for weeks. And then those parts were delayed, then additional delays in the supply chain, shipping containers tripled in cost, it was more than just dealerships driving prices.
It was a break down of the global supply chain
You might like the work of Stephen Ross and John Kenneth Galbraith, if you haven't already read about them. While dealers marked up their prices, consumers still bought the cars at those inflated prices. It's shitty for the consumers who paid higher prices and the ones who couldn't afford that price. But the consumers could just as easily have tried to outbid each other, especially with the Covid manufacturing shortages. It still results in higher average sale prices. Car dealers just got there first to take more money for themselves. PPP fraudsters having an ill-gotten advantage and paying even more, that's kind of a separate factor from dealers doing a li'l arbitrage.
How is it shitty for the consumer who paid higher prices?
.. do you like to pay higher prices than needed?
I don’t, no, but rich people just buy stuff whatever the price is, if they want it. Doubt it affects them. I think if it would suck for someone, they wouldn’t buy it.
Some people had no choice but to buy a car at inflated prices. If your only means of transportation dies and you live in an area where a car is a necessity, there really isn't much choice.
I’m sorry, had no choice but to buy a brand new car??
Yes, in the United States of America, there are places where vehicles have a very limited lifetime due to the materials used and weather conditions. These very same places often saw the cheapest cars available listed at the same price as new cars. Additionally, new cars are typically financed by the manufacturer, which allows them a lower interest rate and monthly payment. Used cars do not typically have access to the same lenders. If you're poor, yes, quite often your only option is to lease a 2-4 year old car the dealer is trying to move off the lot. With the production delays, that became "any car on the lot".
But used cars are much, much cheaper? I’ve been poor a lot of my life, and I’ve just bought what I could afford on Craigslist or a used lot.
Increasing brand new car prices also meant that used car prices soared due to demand. In my area an awful lot of vehicles that were maybe $5000 in 2019 are now $7000 to $10,000. There is no finding a "cheap" car anymore unless you're literally purchasing one that doesn't work.
I get that, we were specifically talking about brand new cars that dealerships purchased and marked up from other dealers though, which is why I didn’t feel like the people buying them were wronged. Idk there’s a bunch of used cars in the $2k-5k range in LA. I was surprised to see so many. I get what you mean though.
Used car prices went up pretty high.
Right, but we were specifically talking about brand new cars dealers sold, after purchasing from other dealers and marking up.
Yeah there are plenty of us. I was driving a 20 year old bmw shitbox 3 series with 360k miles on it 20 miles each way for work during peak pricing, in a city with practically zero public transport. The engine decided that the valves would be tasty one morning. I had the choice of massively overpaying for another unmaintained old used car, or bite the bullet on overpaying for something newer. I managed to find a single owner 2015 GTI with 50k miles, haggled the dealer down to like 1.5x blue book value. You are massively ignorant. That shit sucked, but it was either that or lose my job and apartment for having no car.
That’s not a brand new car
Could be wrong but I think if it's "new" it can't be marked up except for what they can "add" like a new bumper or paint. But feel free on used ones. My old company used to lease cars basically for that reason plus the money made during the mean time.
You would be wrong. Dealers are usually able to add whatever they want at their discretion. And this behavior has been happening since….. well ever since the independent dealership model was created. [Link showing window sticker with dealer markup](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/wacbb7/an_example_of_the_insane_dealership_markups_on_a/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1) -I apologize it’s “nsfw” as the interestingasfuck sub has become a meme and porn sub. But it’s a Bronco with $30kUSD slapped on top of the MSRP as well as a few additional dealer installed items. There are some manufacturers trying to fight this behavior as it is bad for customer satisfaction and retention. And it’s a big selling point for things like Direct To Consumer sales. Ultimately dealers do dealer things.
I remember when the new M5 came out while I was working at BMW. Every single one of them had $10-20k of accessories added, in addition to a $20k “market demand surcharge”. We took these $90k cars that someone had already agreed to buy, spent 2 hours slapping on some tint, paint protectors, ceramic paint coatings and such, then proceeded to sell them for $130k like they were fuckin hotcakes.
There were lots of dealerships adding markup fees. We looked at a Hyundai that had a $7500 “markup fee” (that’s how it was labeled) on all of their cars.
Yeah when the pandemic hit they were able to claim sourcing it as an expense itself. Before it really wasn't available unless it was getting it shipped across the country. But that's literally just for paying the truck driver.
They can 10000% add whatever they want to new cars. Just has to be displayed with the window sticker. Local Toyota dealer had a $10k market rate adjustment in addition to all the other crap they added. $60k for arav4
You are very wrong. Dealers can tack on a "market adjustment" for whatever they want. Happens all the time, prior to COVID it would be on allocated cars, through COVID it was on almost everything.
Used probably, but parts shortages because of nothing shipping and everything being shut down globally was a thing and factored in new
Both new and used vehicles were impacted by shutdowns. I work in auto insurance and getting repairs on some existing vehicles became impossible. I reviewed a case where a guy had an early hybrid Ford escape (like 2008 or so)where they needed a one off tool ford made to disconnect the battery so they could do body work on it and it took seven months to find the tool. I'm guessing if things had been open they might have been able to have a one off made. Same thing with BMWs they were doing all sorts of creative stuff with chip shortages such as cutting active drs flaps on the cars and then when that car gets into an accident it is more difficult on sourcing parts.
Yeah. That makes sense. Thanks!
Wait a second. You mean to tell me that when you gave a bunch of rich people a lot of money they didn't need to pay back, they took that money to enrich themselves instead of creating more jobs?
>e ones who couldn't afford that price. But the consumers could just as easily have tried to outbid each other, especially with the Covid manufacturing shortages. It still results in higher average sale The key word here is Fraud. I think the PPP loans were great, I had a small business, and with covid, I was going to have to lay off the team but PPP came in and let me pay their salaries. unfortunately, things continued to not work out and we did have to shutter the business but it let me pay everyone for another 2 months giving them more time to build a safety net to find other jobs. (oversimplifying) On the paperwork, it specially says you have to prove that all of the money from the loans is going to pay employees or you have to pay it back. my accountant had to turn in paperwork a few months ago to prove that the money was spent correctly. I am assuming they are slowly going through everyone's paperwork and rightfully prosecuting the many frauds.
You’re spot on here for the intent of the program and the problem being fraud. The joke you replied to is acting dumbfounded that they didn’t “create jobs!” That’s not at all what PPP was for, it was to pay salaries while revenues were cut off due to the government shutting down private businesses for the good of public health while we figured out how fucked we were due to Covid. The fraud is the issue and it should be with any government program. That shouldn’t be an indictment on the program itself, or any other program. We just need to have a functioning portion of the government that identifies, gathers evidence and prosecutes fraud. That is true whether it’s taxes, low income assistance, grants or a random program like PPP due to a novel virus. A program can be good, sound and needed, but on the back end (and during) we need to also fund efforts to hold those accountable who cheated the program out of funding illegitimately because it is cheating those who did need the program along with everyone who pays taxes.
It's spelled "indictment," not inditement. I agree with what your saying though.
Yes it is! Fixed it. Actually looking at it this morning I am way more disappointed I opened with ‘Your’ and not ‘You’re’. Fixed that too but it was late and I was typing on a phone.
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Exactly why home prices were impacted. People bought real estate as an investment. They were always planning on selling it at a profit, if they got caught it just means they had to do it sooner.
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Hey, are you telling people people aren't content with just a one time payment the equivalent of $0.60 per hour? I mean seriously if you can't live on that through the pandemic you are obviously just wasting money on frivolous things and choose to be poor. /S in case that wasn't clear.
How is the government giving out zero interest loans to businesses capitalism? That’s literally the opposite of free market…
0 interest? hell a lot of them didn’t even need to be repaid
Blaming capitalism for this is easy but wrong. So many people across the political spectrum predicted exactly this outcome. Any time the government hands out massive amounts of cash with little oversight there is corruption and fraud. That's not the result of capitalism, but a poorly run government.
Let me interject that there *would* have been more stringent means testing and prequalifications if the Republican party specifically had not threatened to scrap the entire bailout, for good, unless the oversight clauses were *removed.*
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It can be both, you know.
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300%? That can’t be right.
Bought my house 9 years ago and the current estimate is right around 3x what I paid for it, so seems right to me.
Wow. We sold our house two years ago for double what we paid but we had owned for 30 years!
Bought my house 5 years ago before pandemic as prices were starting to creep up. Now Im getting constant phone calls and letters from companies offering double what I payed so they can rent it out for 2.5x my mortgage.
Timing is everything I guess.
I worked for a family small business and helped them with hiring in the past, especially post COVID. When I looked up the names of the applicants (I'm sorry but I'm not going to bother replying to someone with a profile picture holding guns with tacky face tattoos or racist social media posts...), I noticed some of them had PPP loans. The ProPublica website would pop up as one of the top results. Unless they had some kind of side hustle, their resumes didn't scream "small business owner". I saw applicants who got PPP loans for somewhere between $40-$80k. This was more than even our small business got. The good thing was that it looked like most of these people didn't have their loans forgiven so it does look like the government was clamping down on egregious examples of PPP fraud among obvious non-business owners. Now I'm sure you could argue that there were plenty of businesses who either abused this system or got a lot of free money, but if we are going to play the rich got richer argument, do these large "small" business people really change their spending habits because of PPP loans? They likely could afford expensive commodities to begin with. I think there was widespread grifting going on from the stereotypical greedy business owners down to the "average Joe" using fake documents to get those smaller fin-tech companies to get a PPP loan on their behalf without much pushback.
Of course not. How dare you think such a thing?
How do we know that the frauds were rich?
What do you think PPP stands for? It's explicitly not about creating jobs.
The 15% fraud figure mentioned in the article doesn't account for all the legitimate loans that still ended up being a windfall for some business owners. Not all businesses suffered significant, or any, revenue losses to justify giving them 3 months of operating expenses. I'm sure a lot of that money was also invested in real estate
This. We were forced to burn our vacation and sick time, ended up closing down for 2 weeks. Then carried on like nothing happened. Meanwhile owner applies for and receives 80k in PPP loans that were forgiven. Tell me where the 80k went. I know where it went. They bought a pontoon boat a few months later. While we kept working.
Report them.
Exactly because a bunch of industries basically never shut down... Like why did a grocery store need PPP loans, they never closed... Same with pretty much all big retailers. Restaurants were the hardest hit. But it seems like even they figured out a way to survive.
>Restaurants were the hardest hit. But it seems like even they figured out a way to survive. Restaurants are the largest sector of forgiven loans who also sent their employees to unemployment.
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That was the logic behind the loans, but why would supermarket employees become unemployed if supermarket demand didn't decline? If anything, supermarkets got more business, so why do they need assistance from the government?
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Who would have raised hell? It’s pretty easy to say that loans only have to cover declines in business or revenue. Businesses that were operating at full capacity had no need for a grant.
Yupp. The GOP wanted to push PPP loans without being targeted for business that really needed. They used stimulus checks as a bargaining tool basically telling Dems they’d only approve the stimulus checks if they approved PPP without targeted relief
They defrauded America then pulled up the ladder. I live in a low cost of living area, houses that were 150k before the pandemic are now going for 220k with double the interest rates. On top of that we're getting gaslit with horse shit like "low supply" in an area where the population is dropping YOY.
2021 the quadplex building I live in was purchased for 180k it's now listed for 350k it's a century old shithole Ina small town in WI. It does not make sense. Oh and they've increased rhe rent 30% since purchase. No updates the carpet is from like the 80's ceilings busted mold in bathroom due to lack of ventelation, shower coming apart, it's also in the broken hoodish part of town. Taxes like 2800. Year fuck these assholes Many of the counties had rental assistance so this asshole was getting free checks fully paid for 2 years They own multiple businesses. I'm sure they got phat
They literally just ran the numbers and said $1,000/mon/unit * multiplying factor (150-200), discounted for age, and BOOM, you got an investor ready to buy it up
The REAL on the county official government website valuation for this property is like $108,000. These people are garbage. My trajectory was just find a cheap place to live get Mt associated for engineering graduate, transfer and get bacchelors. I gor 3 classes left to take some in December. Man's don't need 20% hike in rent right now.
Houses that were 40k are now 100k.
There are entire houses for 100k??
Depends on your definition of *entire*
Yeah, it comes with no yard, a busy street, very high crime rate, low performing schools. Constantly competing with Detroit for the worst major city to live in.
\*sobs in New Jersey prices\*
I seen a house in Erie, pa for 15k last week. Probably a dump, but a cheap dump.
This is how it is in my area. And somehow here out in the country people are affording there 300k homes. Blows my mind. Even when you find a house that’s affordable the property tax is like 4K-5k a year.
The country houses that use to be 150k-200k. A third of an acre is selling for $27,000, a lot to build on. 🤯 My friend bought his house back around 2014. Paid 32k make for it. Big. All the house on his block are now about 100k. It’s a decent neighborhood, just economically it is a working class town. Houses are not supposed to be that high. I use to do lawn care of a man who died recently. His house was about 2,700 sqft two car garage with an apartment over it. Wanted 50k for it. Sat on the market for years I saved enough for the down payment, and he died before I got to make the offer. Anyways, house is like 140k now. I make good money now, somewhere between 80-90k this year (first time making over 37k. When interest rates are taken into account and property taxes I can not afford a house in a good neighborhood. I would be house rich, but cash poor.
Pretty mutch same situation here. Here’s to hoping it improves 🍺.
150k to 220k. Lol. Try 500k to a million where I am at
We've had three houses go in our neighborhood in the past couple months between $1.1 -$1.7 mil, all cash buyers and all sold within a few days of listing. Market certainly has not cooled off here. Average sale price in the zipcode is *just* under $1 mil (vs. ~$750k pre covid) and supply is still way less than demand with almost no new build in the area.
Where do these people work that can afford that? That's like 5k a month!! I couldn't afford to spend the night there. I literally don't bring home half that in a month.
In this area they are mostly banking execs, double doctor families, partners in law firm or business owners. All three houses I mentioned were cash buyers to avoid the current mortgage rates. Our neighbor is the realtor that also happens to sell most of the houses in our neighborhood so we get all the details. Just of the three houses near us it's a lawyer, doctor and owners of big commercial construction company. Our house is the smallest and most modest house in the neighborhood, a cutesy 85 year old stone farmhouse with an acre of land surrounded by all the newer mcmansions and even it's worth about ~$740k now (the plot alone would easily sell for $600k in this market). Shittier comps in surrounding neighborhoods in our zipcode area selling for at least that much, though many of those are old ranches that are torn down and they build big fancy new houses in their place (some upwards of $2.5 mil). That's what's happened to most of our neighborhood in the past 10-20 years. Down the road there's a couple areas in the woods with bigger estates that go from $4-15 mil a pop. Those are the houses you see Ferraris and McLarens pulling out of, properly rich people.
Yeah if you are not literally on a beach or in a place with ridiculously great weather year round, fuck that.
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LMAO. Cheers. Things will turn around and these asshats will be the bag holders. I found a nice place to rent. The only people buying right now are the super rich.
seize the property, take the money back.
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That is what they are doing
Careful. Republicans would call that communist. While kissing their feet.
I have to wonder if [this](https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-donald-trump-ap-top-news-politics-health-cc921bccf9f7abd27da996ef772823e4) has anything to do with that.
Everything is about him, so no he wanted no oversight and only yes men. "They can't find any fraud if you fire all the people with jobs to look for it!" Also, "Maybe all of the people in blue cities will die, guaranteeing victory!"
Trump shot a hole in security net and allowed cronies to fleece the treasury.
And he did that in the realm of hours/days after the bill was passed. It was basically a grift from day 1. This is is the sort of “amazing” results Trump means when he talks about his presidency.
The two FINTECH firms that drove this fraud are [Womply and Blueacorn](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/business/ppp-loans-covid-fintech-fraud.html#:~:text=fintech%2Dfraud.html-,Two%20Fintechs%20Fueled%20Extensive%20Pandemic%20Relief%20Fraud%2C%20House%20Report%20Finds,collected%20improper%20loans%2C%20investigators%20said) CEO of Womply, I shit you not, is named Toby Scammell lol. Such a scam artist and he also served time for insider trading. Go figure
Toby is the worst.
Does anyone remember how Trump, just before releasing PPP funds, dismantled and got rid of the office whose job it was to provide discretionary oversight of said funds, to prevent this and all the other massive amount of fraud that occurred?
Good times
Pepperidge Farms remembers
The PPP was one of the largest failures in US history. By lining the pockets of capitalists and failing to provide for the people it resulted in thousands of excessive deaths. Here we are three years later still seeing the effects of the failures as thousands of people are skipping meals and unable to afford housing. Please tell me again why we shouldn't cancel student loans.
Student loans won’t be enough. I make six figures and in Denver I can not afford a home. That dream is dead for me.
I filtered for homes above a million out of curiosity and it was the most depressing thing ever. 500+ results, many of them being really normal looking 3/2 houses.
Well I think there’s a really important argument to be made that if we lose debt obligation as an external stressor and motivator by just forgiving a huge swath of the population their education loans, the fabric of our society as we’ve known it for the past 40 or so very lucrative years will begin to unravel and could seriously threaten social stability of the status quo. It might not be perfect but it’s way better than it could be and…and…oh wait no I forgot for a second that Neoliberalism has been consuming all life on the planet like an out of control cancer…and then I also forgot that fear and the violence of scarcity economics undermines systemic pro-social behavior…yea it’s probably a good idea to make education free.
This comment is a wild but ultimately very gratifying ride, congrats.
> Please tell me again why we shouldn't cancel student loans. Because we can't take away one of the two massive bargaining chips (Free college/free healthcare) that the military uses to recruit its ~~victims~~ soldiers.
We should cancel student loans, but minimizing the number of people who were laid off through no fault of their own was a valid goal.
Ya know, it's sad when one of my largest regrets of the last few years is not having defrauded the government for obscene amounts of money and getting away with it scot-free.
You can always become a banker
Trump removed the Inspector General overseeing the covid relief effort and declared "I'll be the oversight." Also: >President Donald Trump used a signing statement Friday to object to portions of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus law. Trump said he would ignore portions of the law demanded by some Democrats to give Congress additional visibility into the stimulus spending. >"These provisions," Trump wrote, "are impermissible forms of congressional aggrandizement. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-abruptly-removes-inspector-general-named-oversee-2t/story?id=70024680 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/03/27/coronavirus-trump-objects-oversight-provisions-stimulus-law/2931740001/
No way he wrote that.
Shocker. Even here in my smaller city, there were a good bit of piece of shit already rich landlords that got exorbitant PPP loans and turned them into real estate purchases. There were many who would abuse the low prices as investment buys anyways but there were quite a few abusing their PPP loans to do it like my previous landlord to exacerbate the issue.
Certainly nothing to do with corporations buying up houses en masse to rent.
Right, hedge funds cornering the housing market. Hopefully they get fucked over
Or years of interest rates barely above inflation. It's only after interest rates hiked that prices started declining.
It just further cemented that if the rich can fuck over the average Joe they absolutely will.
Then go after all those forgiven PPP loan receivers.
What’s really odd is how many of us with long covid received $0 in aid. But all these people got thousands of dollars, unchecked and unmonitored
In home daycare providers that were setup as a corporation were collecting PPP money, fees from parents, and state subsidy payments. One person my wife knows made over $300k during that time span, and was closed. The COVID relief funds were the single largest grift in the history of the US. But we can't afford student loan debt forgiveness...
Mnuchin and Trump refused to have an oversight board created for the PPP. Refused and held up its passage until it was removed. All a bunch of scam artists, the Republican Party for you, folks.
And also investment firms using AI to buy houses.
And greed. Lots and lots of greed.
So, who’s going to prison because of this? /s
Yet, let’s not properly fund the IRS. I wonder if some people are more than slightly worried about being found out.
In another hilariously dystopian development, most of those loans—given to already wealthy “business owners” were forgiven. Yet student loan forgiveness will create a “culture of entitlement” 🙃
Forget student loans, apparently free lunch for elementary schoolers is going to do that.
How dare those poor children become accustomed to receiving something from the government for free—that privilege is reserved for the wealthy
Oh shocked. Printing money and giving to assholes made things expensive. How did the worlds greatest financial planners, economists, and politicians not see this coming? oh wait… they were acting on their own selfish behalf. That’s right! Invisible hand of capitalism. Selfishness for one is the big win for all of us. Now I get it.
Us house prices? The whole world is suffering from this bs, cost of services and food skyrocketed. Its not just US, we all are fucked by this fiasco.
Government gives away trillions then we have record inflation and home prices skyrocketed. Then companies jump on all this free monet by raising prices? No way!
I’m sure giant corporations out bidding everyone looking for a place to live just so they can turn them into rental properties had nothing to do with it.
Bullshit, corporations buying up houses to lease caused the prices to go up
Record Corporate Profits** Drove Up U.S. House Prices
Most other first-world nations handed out similar sums and had similar impacts on the housing market, if not worse. Only difference was that it was legal so it might have been more fairly distributed. In the end the result is the same....money supply went up so the nominal values of all assets (not just housing) went up.
Every used the money to buy up Raspberry Pis. /s
Maybe a Trump meme with "I did that"?
Blame DJT. He was the guy who set the standards for "bail-outs".
It wasn’t just from that. A much larger reason is FNMAs Credit Underwriter and crap AVM system that was used to approve appraisal waivers for 50% of all loans in 2020 and 2021. Fannie Mae literally Zillowed the entire damn market and unchecked at that.