bob diamond now runs atlas merchant capital which this week is launching a new distressed corporate credit fund and has multiple portfolio companies, by the way, none of which requested loans. welcome, bob. good to see you. all right. not for lack of trying, private equity had the door pretty much slammed in its face. what do you make of that? >> listen, our focus is on a couple things. one is we are investors in financial services and as you said, we are about to launch a distressed credit fund as well. we are very focused on investing and our portfolio companies and new opportunities but what i would say about the sba is this. their focus should be on small businesses and it has been on small businesses. over 60% of the small businesses in our country have laid people off, notwithstanding this program and all the things that the fed and treasury have been doing. and in many european countries, up to 70% or 80% of the employment in those countries comes from small companies with less than 500 employees. so that should be the sba focus. i think that has been the sba focus. liz: you know, y

first let me start with you bob diamond.nse of the coronavirus and its impact on the economy and the banking sector. what do you take away as sort of most important here putting obviously the sickness and the deaths aside in terms of returning back to business. >> so the impact on the economy we'll see more of that today with the unemployment numbers but i think everyone is -- there's kind of a consensus that the near term impact to the economy is going to be huge. on the other hand, i think that the action taken by the fed and the treasury in terms of the speed, in terms of the size of what they're doing, in terms of the impact and the breadth has been very helpful to the financial markets. you know, it's interesting, maria, in the last couple of days, looking through some of our portfolio companies, one of our companies here in the u.s., south street securities, which is a repo business, has seen the impact of all of these actions at first created quite a bit of volatility. liquidity, yes, but volatility. over the last cou