[gowld]

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.

[arinlen]

> 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?

[1986]

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.