Funds that went to large non-retail businesses, like airlines, should have had far more strings attached. As the CARES Act was written, it placed a 12 month moratorium on stock buybacks, dividends, and executive pay increases but allowed those restrictions to be waived by the Fed and/or Treasury on a case by case basis, and they often were waived. Those restrictions should have had a time horizon closer to 5 years, and no waivers should have been permitted.
In many ways, this mirrored the bank bailouts of 2008-9. If the government is going to save your corporation from extinction, then it needs to receive something in return - at a minimum, shareholders need to take a haircut as they would in a bankruptcy proceeding. The policy objective should have been to protect the overall economy from the demise of critical industries, not the preservation of existing shareholder wealth.
In practice this meant small, founder-led service companies were hit harder because working business owners couldn't take advantage of this and cutting hours also meant not being able to invest as much time in rebuilding or pivoting. Additionally the subsidies also barely covered stocking expenses (e.g. for losses from perishable goods expiring during lockdowns) so the only type of business that really benefited were medium scale companies with enough financial reserves to survive sending every employee home while the subsidies would cover a large chunk of recurring business expenses, i.e. mostly manufacturing companies.
There were also some additional subsidies but they used almost surgical precision to similarly limit who could apply, e.g. solo entrepreneurs without employees (but again, not covering payroll) or companies that had more than X% of employees working at least Y% short-time while also having at least one employee out of short-time mentoring someone in a job training, or a tax rebate for companies paying out "COVID bonuses" to employees (which in practice just translates to giving tax subsidies to large companies paying out bonuses to senior executives in the middle of a pandemic).
https://rsmus.com/what-we-do/services/tax/state-and-local-ta...
While we were affected by a reduction in orders at beginning of the pandemic , we would have survived without layoffs anyway. But we decided to take the money and hold on to it in case the situation got worse. Now we’re sitting on a pot of gold that is supposed to help our workers from losing their jobs, but our current biggest labor issue is short staffing.
And giving everyone raises after a record year of inflation isn’t exactly a headline statement. It’s more like - “our workers would have made less this year than last year if we hadn’t given them raises… and probably would’ve quit. So, we had to give them raises.”
Don't know how much the chip scarcity is related to Covid or if it is just useless coin miners.
edit: Not located in the US though.
Maybe we shouldn't have had mandatory lockdowns to start with? Free choice and small government sounds nice right about now to me.
Lots of people in the executive wing and their friends/cronies benefited: it was competence, but in the way one would hope. A member of cabinet resisted[1] releasing names of companies that benefited from PPE loans to congress, calling it "proprietary information" - that was not an accident or bumbling.
1. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/06/13/mnuchin-ppp-...
Two mentioned how they were initially hesitant to apply for money, but then worried that if they didn't, their business could take a downturn after it was too late. Then as long as they spent the money on payroll (which they had to pay for anyway), they didn't have to pay it back, even if their business didn't show any losses. I shudder to think of how much the bigger players yanked out of it.