In the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the government launched the Paycheck Protection Program, a trillion-dollar effort to incentivize employers to retain their employees during the quarantine and maintain most of their compensation. The program was administered by the Small Business Association (SBA) and provided forgivable loans to eligible employers who keep their people on payroll. The idea was a good one, but the execution was terrible. There are millions of employees, self-employed people, independent contractors and small businesses who were excluded. Most of the money did not get to where it was intended.
A lot of companies are not open for business, and if the goal was for the money to get to workers, then the government should have avoided all the middlemen and funded the money directly to the employees. The entire economic relief package related to COVID-19 will end up costing about $6 Trillion. The government could have paid every worker in America $4000/mo for six months for only $2.4 Trillion. Think about it. PPP was not a total failure, but it has been too bureaucratic and way too many people who are important to our economy were left out.
In less than four years, DEI went from being a widely accepted bipartisan solution for America’s precarious wealth and income gaps to the root cause of every failure known to man.
Professional investors know that the best way to make it big is to believe in something that almost everyone disagrees with - and be right. That could be a business idea, an investment opportunity, or a cultural trend.
Next week, I will be speaking at a Hispanic Leadership Summit at the United Nations. I was asked to speak on the topic of Unity. The following is a preview of my speech.