The banks did repay their loans, this is true.
They also got to take HUGE risks without having to bear the risk, yet they got to capture the entire reward.
The government didn't charge the big banks a multi-trillion dollar tax for taking on the risk of doing TARP.
The entire purpose of TARP was to prevent a depression. It was meant to be a stopgap.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...
https://nowthisnews.com/videos/politics/jennifer-lawrence-is...
Federal elected officials spend 70% of their time now fundraising, so they only listen to their donors. And their donors are billionaires and large institutions.
So there is no statistical correlation now between an issue's popularity and whether it gets passed into law (voters have been disenfranchised).
Meaning the next bailout will happen exactly the same as the last one, unless left-right coalitions and other organizations work to end corruption at the local grassroots level and work their way up to state and federal.
Or by "bailout" you mean something different?
The problem is that in this case, the government chose to bail out the giant entities that caused the problem, and totally ignore the individual citizens who were really harmed by it.
Anyways, TARP was dwarfed by Quantitative Easing. The FED printed around $1.8 trillion to buy distressed assets from banks. To this day the FED still holds some $1.7 trillion in mortgage backed securities on its books.
If they could have cashed those checks, paid executive bonuses, AND not paid back their loan; they wouldn't have.