COVID relief spending overwhelmingly enriched the largest corporations.

Evidence

In 2020, the longest bull market in U.S. history came to a sudden halt due to COVID-19. The Federal Reserve once again stepped in, this time providing loans to nonfinancial corporations for the first time since the 1930s, stabilizing the corporate bond market, which was at risk of collapsing. Corporations piled on debt, and executives enriched themselves through stock buybacks, as discussed below. Meanwhile, in Congress, over 4 trillion of the 6.2 trillion CARES Act, the vast majority, went to the country’s biggest, wealthiest companies. “The equivalent of two and a half times U.S. annual corporate profits, or about 20 percent of U.S. annual GDP,” Brenner notes, “was authorized to be dispensed without undue surveillance and with no strings attached.” Meanwhile, the four hundred richest Americans increased their wealth by 40 percent, adding $4.5 trillion to their coffers. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 89

Categorization

• XREF: The Fed’s first-ever corporate bond market support in 2020 and its Post-2008 framework establishes the bailout infrastructure deWaard will trace into cultural production — relevant to reader’s causal chain.