Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

GSE Developments

By -

Three major GSE developments over the last 10 days will greatly impact the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Dick Bove of Odeon Capital outlined the three GSE developments in a recent note.

The biggest GSE development is the Seila Law case, although the ruling was directly aimed at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. The Supreme Court ruled that although the CFPB might be legal, the position of its director is not.

Bove explained that the Supreme Court justices believe the Constitution should be interpreted as it is written and amended and that the laws of Congress should be followed as written. He also said that they fear bureaucrats aren’t following the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress.

(more…)

Asset Managers and the SBA

By -

The Small Business Association’s (SBA)’s Payroll Protection Program (PPP) handed out loans to small businesses, but it isn’t just small businesses getting the loans. Criticism of the program continues as officials released details on hundreds of thousands of businesses that received PPP loans from the SBA, many of which will be forgivable.
The Payroll Protection Program was designed to bail out small businesses impacted by the pandemic, but many firms that took the bailout money weren’t impacted by the pandemic.

The SBA’s PPP loans were supposed to be for small businesses that had to shut down during the pandemic. However, many large businesses, including asset management firms that didn’t actually shut down, are taking the loans.

(more…)

Hedge Funds & the PPP

By -

Note from Tim: as a reminder, I put together a spreadsheet of Palo Alto firms that got over $150,000 in PPP loans. Check it out here. If you don’t have an AirTable account, it’ll ask you to sign up for free.

I had noted a few months ago that many of these firms getting the PPP loans were not ‘in the spirit’ of the program.

Without any real ‘oversight’ the compliance part of these loans seems – – – questionable — on some.  I am not sure how it all really works, but the American public likely believes these funds should have gone to the ‘small business’, with waiters, waitresses, or bartenders who obviously couldn’t work.  This was the spirit of the PPP program.

And, there are others – the people at the gyms and yoga studios.  At the nail salon and corner barber shops.  There are many, many businesses, and it seems everyone has a hardship story.

(more…)

I Need to PPP

By -

You’ve probably read that on Monday the SBA released all the data related to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Everyone who got under $150,000 in loans was anonymous, while all those $150,000 and over were named. (Side Note: just to show how psychotic I am, I stayed up Monday night and put this together of all the Palo Alto PPP recipients. Enjoy).

Even though this program was ostensibly to help out small businesses, quite a number of the firms served are relatively larger, public companies. I have been sifting through the monstrous amount of data, and it’s quite fascinating. For instance, I found 1,351 different companies in my little town of Palo Alto received PPP loans. Only 50,000 people live here in the first place!

Anyway, I put together a list of the largest public companies that got PPP loans, which is the downloadable text file below. You can use this in conjunction with the SlopeCharts import function if you’d like to check out the charts of the firms that saw a need to get an emergency loan.

Here are the biggest public PPP borrowersDownload