[mtgx]

Even without reading through the article first, I knew that you were referring to TARP. They might've gotten a "profit" on TARP, but the government gave them a lot more than just TARP, through other programs, and some of the banks even used the money from other programs that they were supposed to use to finance small businesses, to pay back the TARP loan.

Bottomline is, the government may have gotten the money back on TARP, but I think they gave the banks a lot more, and it was a net loss. I mean we didn't even know about the $7.7 trillion the Fed printed to loan to banks in both US and through out the world. Those loans were secret. How do we know they paid them back or not?

[parasubvert]

Um, thats a misreading of the old Bloomberg report that invented the $7.7 trillion figure. Actual loans appear on the Fed balance sheet. The Fed offered 7.7 trillion in loan guarantees over a period of time, many of which were quickly wound down, which is a very different matter. The Fed currently has a balance sheet of $2.8T: 1.6T is government loans, about 1T are mortgage backed securities from the 2008 crisis.

See http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/no-the-fed-d...

and

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2011/12/777_trillion_in....