Four months ago, Congress approved the ambitious and unprecedented Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) as part of the $2 trillion pandemic rescue package, and now we’re starting to see the benefits of that in the shale patch, of all places. PPP involves federal loans to small- and medium-sized businesses primarily to help them keep their workers on the payroll. The low-interest loans are potentially forgivable provided 60% of the loan goes to pay workers over the course of 24 weeks. About $660B of the loans have been disbursed to SMBs, with up to $2.5B of that finding its way to the Texas shale patch where a huge number of companies were teetering on the edge of survival long before the pandemic struck. As expected, the loans have received their fair share of flak, mainly on the grounds of fairness and accountability, with the WSJ lambasting them as being little more […]