Later you claim that is just fine to support big banks because said banks exist to "spread risks". But of course the biggest risk for a country is in the existence of banks that are too big to fail, since they need to be saved by the government. Therefore, banks in fact perform ZERO risk reduction. They CLAIM to take risks away from the system, but when a crisis occur the whole tab of bad betts will be paid by the citizens of a particular country, not by bankers.
As for control of the US and EU, just look at who is responsible for economic policy in these places and tell me if they're not from the same half dozen banks that are already deemed to be too big to fail! What a coincidence...
[1]: https://www.thebalance.com/aig-bailout-cost-timeline-bonuses...
The results do not justify the process. Would small business owners be offered the same loans that were unjustifiable based on assets:liabilities? I can answer that for you right now as someone who has cash in the bank to cover a six figure loan but can't get one due to a 690ish credit score: No, they won't.
That we made a profit on (some of the) bailouts doesn't matter. The same process would never be offered to 99.999% of the other citizens of this country.
Remember TARP bought the assets for close to their realized value, so the loss was already priced in.
All as a result of yet another financial crisis caused by irresponsible and greedy financial institutions.
But I think that those responsible for the financial crisis should have been charged and done prison time.
Tax rates went up. (At least, where I am. Don't know about the US)
> the government and taxpayers made a $23 billion profit
How much of this did taxpayers actually get (in terms of, for example, decreased tax rates, or anything else that directly benefits the taxpayer)?
You can disagree without being so rude.
The not-too-representationally selected/elected leaders of China want to keep the power of pegging their currency, which is very essential in a centrally planned economy, at the cost of personal freedoms. (And the yearly 50 000 USD limit is more than enough for poor people to send all of their savings away to a fraudster though, so it's not absolutely the right thing.)
A powerful private banking system is very different from a shadow bank that uses identity theft/fraud to store and gambling to exchange currencies. A healthy banking system helps allocate credit (which is risk), but since the barriers to entry to the finance sector is high (cost of regulatory compliance, IT security risks), margins are low (products are fungible, a mortgage is a mortgage, a savings/checking account is a savings/checking account, it doesn't matter which bank you chose, so you'll use the cheapest) and network effects are also high, we don't really see a healthy banking sector. (Thus risks are largely concentrated in too big to fail banks, and that's why the new big bank requirements include systemic exposure stress test regulations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_III - of course, it's easy to argue that this just moves bubbles somewhere else.)
As to the other claims ("Now we see the US and the EU largely controlled by banking interests" - no, we don't, we see populism/nationalism/chauvinism, we see good old regulatory capture [the FCC Chairman is an ex-Verizon lawyer currently playing dumb for a lot of money, or just out of spite, the EPA lead is a proud climate change denier, the current UK leaders are typical isolationists, and so on], "very little if any taxes applied to financial gains" - cca average of 15% is not very little https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax and "the entire industrial complex has moved to China" - no, only the labor and raw materials intensive things [which is of course an enormous slice of the pie], but nowadays the problem is with lack of effective retraining in the advanced economies.)