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Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast today is Tuesday, April 7th, 2020.

I'm John Pajor, it's the editor of commentary with me as always. Associate editor Noah Rothman. Hello Noah. Hi John.

Senior editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe. Hi John. Senior writer Christine Rosem. Hi Christine. Hi John.

And joining us today Jerusalem Post columnist, Jewish New Service columnist,

Ruthie Bloom, author of Helen a hand basket and dear Ruthie, a compendium of her advice columns and

coincidentally my sister from Tel Aviv. Hi Ruthie. Hi John. So Ruthie is joining us to tell us we're

going to talk about the immensely complex Israeli political system which looked last night as though a

a new coalition government had been formed finally after the third election and weeks after the

third election only to be tripped up yet again by internal Israeli top politics. So before we get to

that I wanted to read a letter that I got yesterday from a gentleman who works as a loan officer

at a bank because if you remember if you were listening yesterday I talked about how it appeared as

though the fears that the Paycheck Protection Act and the loans that we're going to go out to

small businesses were going to be like Obamacare website too had not had not turned out to be the case

and that a lot of loans had been processed and that it looked like the harnessing of the private sector

by the legislation had worked but this listener wrote to me and said the following. I work as a

mortgage underwriter for the largest bank in my state and after listening to the podcast today I

thought you all would appreciate some insider information but how the SBA loans are being handled I'm

not saying anything that isn't public information. First shortly after the relief bill was passed and

the SBA loans were announced it was chaos. A recent trend in the financial regulation world has been

to not give specific rules to lenders but to simply give guidelines and say that the

spirit of the law must be followed by the financial institutions. This bill took that to the next

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