The CARES Act has moved over $20 billion/month into the hands of business owners. These amounts are nationally significant and have kept many reported government indices out of recessionary mode. This year the monthly cash payments from the IRS to businesses began to ramp up from $20 billion to $40 billion/month which is over half of all corporate income taxes normally received. Due to rampant fraud in this program over 600,000 new applications are now held in suspense with no IRS processing allowed through at least the end of this year. Meanwhile, the Dept. of Justice in collaboration with the IRS have trained auditors to root out fraudsters and attempt recoveries. The fraud is thought to be so large that it has kept the “official” economic statistics looking somewhat healthy vs. recessionary. With or without this fraud, inflation is remaining a serious issue as we’ll describe in this podcast.