Taxpayers should have owned the businesses they bailed out. We gave these banks low interest loans when their only alternative was insolvency. What a crappy bargain! Taxpayers should have owned the banks, helped them recover, and then sold them for huge profits.

What’s JP Morgan worth today? That’s a start in calculating how much was stolen from taxpayers.

The firms should have gone bankrupt. In that case, the government or any solvent entity could have benefited by purchasing the assets at market prices. That the firms did not go bankrupt, was a gift to shareholders from taxpayers.

This is a very uneducated point of view, that ignores the facts in my prior comment.

In a liquidity crunch, perfectly solvent and functional companies can go bankrupt. ...and indeed those that had balance sheets hopelessly underwater DID go bankrupt (ie Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, as well as dozens of other smaller banks).

The fact that the government was able to extend LOANS to other banks is not a "gift" at all, because those loans were paid back with significant interest.

Do you understand, the taxpayer profited from the Wall Street loans of 2008.

Allowing solvent but illiquid companies to go bankrupt is needless economic destruction that serves zero purpose - and the fact that they survived despite having to pay back the gov't loans with interest is evidence of that.